Why Review Sites Matter For Your Business
August 14, 2012 - Posted by Shama Kabani
Transcription of “Why Review Sites Matter For Your Business”: Shama: I know you also stress a lot about review sites. What is it about review sites like Yelp and others that are important to search engine optimization? Idan: Users gather information on the Internet. If it’s from your Website, from a competitor, from Yelp, from another citation, like Google Plus or Google Places or even Bing. All these citations, people go on and they place their view. If you’re not there, your competitors are. Shama: What’s a citation? Idan: A citation is basically a website, a directory, that people have their place of business. Shama: Ok so your information is linked in it. It’s kind of like a yellow pages on the Web and you have so many directories. That’s a citation. Idan: Exactly and there are so many of them. Shama: I love SEO speak. Idan: There are so… read more
Why Google Plus Matters For SEO
August 13, 2012 - Posted by Shama Kabani
Transcription of “Why Google+ Matters For SEO”: Shama: So, Idan, let’s talk about your favorite recent social networking site, because I know you’ve been drilling all of us here at the Marketing Zen Group, and our clients should really amp up their efforts with the infamous Google+ because a lot of people still haven’t figured it out. So tell me, what, why all of this importance on Google+, and from an SEO perspective, why are you so gung-ho about it? Idan: Well, personalized search has been a long coming. We always knew that it’s going to happen. We just didn’t know when. Even before Google+, we saw Twitter had a partnership with Google and you saw a bunch of tweets for specific keyword. Shama: I like that, yeah. Idan: Yeah, so Google definitely wants to be in the arena of social. I mean, you can get a lot of valuable… read more
Automation, Keywords, and Rankings! Oh, my!
August 10, 2012 - Posted by Shama Kabani
Transcription of “Automation, Keywords, and Rankings! Oh, My!”: Shama: One of the things I know is, there are a lot of companies out there and a lot of folks, I know you’re totally against this is, automated SEO. Idan: Right. Shama: Where there is a software, and there is a place and time where you can use software to assist with your efforts, but there’s things out there that people will say, it’s a software, you set it up and it will optimize the website for you. What are your thoughts on that? Is that legit? Idan: One of the things that Google absolutely told us every time is they’re not looking for something that another website can do. We don’t want the same thing on our search engine result page, with the same content, with the same title, with same METAS, same review. Shama: Duplicates are a big no-no… read more
What does it really take to rank well on Google today?
August 9, 2012 - Posted by Shama Kabani
Transcription of “What does it really take to rank well on Google today?”: Shama: This stuff has been going on for a long time. People have been keyword stuffing, wrong link building techniques. A lot of the times sadly people don’t know any better. What’s changed now that Google is all of a sudden catching these things a lot better? Idan: Over the years a lot of people said, content is the king, content is the king, content is the king. Shama: Right. Idan: People said, all right, I’ll just create a bunch of content, stuff some keywords in there, if it’s a good content that people can actually read or not, it doesn’t really matter. Shama: There’s words. Idan: Yes, it’s a bunch of words cramped together, does it make sense or not, whatever, it really doesn’t matter. That’s not what Google wants. They start penalizing websites that threw… read more
What is SEO?
August 7, 2012 - Posted by Shama Kabani
“What is SEO?” video transcription Shama: Hi, this is Shama Kabani, CEO of The Marketing Zen Group. One of the questions we get asked often around here is, What is SEO? Specifically, What is Search Engine Optimization? I’d like to give you a very simple definition, a very simple way of looking at it that I discovered a few years ago, and it’s helped me many times when explaining what is search engine optimization to people who may not be familiar with it. So very simply defined, SEO can be broken down into two parts: one, it’s what you tell search engines you are. So I might use Google and search engines interchangeably, but it really means the same thing. So Google is one of the main search engines, there’s others like Bing and Yahoo, but for the most part, it’s what you tell search engines you are. The other… read more
The ABCs of Link Building for Solid Rankings
July 26, 2012 - Posted by Rilee Chastain
Our top strategies for building quality links for search engine rankings. When it comes to building up your company’s brand and creating a solid, influential place for yourself on the web, it usually takes a lot more effort and energy than simply providing quality content and a solid business plan to bring an audience to your web page. In fact, there are a large number of outside factors that go in to gaining website views, from search engine ranking to interlinking. However, one avenue of digital marketing that many people often overlook is the task of link building. For search engines who are crawling across the web searching for quality content, link-based factors are a large portion of a search engines algorithm. Through links, these search engines are not only able to analyze the popularity of any given website, but can also measure important metrics such as spam, authority and… read more
What Does Google’s Penguin Algorithm Mean for Your SEO Strategies?
July 6, 2012 - Posted by Amanda Norris
Since the official release of Google’s newest algorithm, Penguin, back in April, sites across the web have seen their rankings take a hit as Google’s latest algorithm cracks down on sites that aren’t playing by Google’s rules. Furthering their quest to give users content that is not only relevant but also valuable and authentic, Penguin is Google’s latest attempt at cutting out sites that abuse and manipulate SEO tactics – such as content spinning and keyword stuffing – to try to eliminate web spam from earning high search rankings. Let’s start by taking a minute to discuss what Penguin is – and what it isn’t. First, Penguin is an algorithm change, not a manual penalty. This means that any ranking drops or gains from Penguin are due to automated changes in the way Google weighs and penalizes different features, not a manual penalty against your site. There is also somewhat… read more
Does Yelp’s New Partnership Spell Trouble for Google’s Dominance?
June 27, 2012 - Posted by Amanda Norris
For most of recent tech history, Google has been king. It dominates U.S. search engine market share, with 66% as of January 2012. Its web browser, Google Chrome, recently overtook the ubiquitous Internet Explorer to take the lead with nearly 33% of the market share, and Google’s Android mobile OS leads all other smartphones. But with recent partnerships with companies such as Apple, Yelp may be on its way to topple Google from its throne – at least as far as local search and SEO are concerned. Since Apple released the iPhone 4S last year, Yelp has been providing much of the content for Siri, the phone’s much-hyped voice recognizing “personal assistant”. Though the local search experience with Siri is imperfect, and Yelp’s branding in the system was kept to a minimum, it seems that Apple and Yelp have bigger plans in the works: namely, teaming up to bring Yelp’s… read more
Google Search Results Now Include Your Private Content
January 10, 2012 - Posted by Shama Kabani
In the coming days, you may see a dramatic change in how Google presents your search results. Google has already been integrating social search with regular search since February 2011, placing pages that your connections have shared on Google+ or other sites (excluding Facebook) higher in search results. For example, let’s say I search for The Marketing Zen Group. This article by our CEO Shama Kabani appears very high up on my first page of results. Since I am logged into my Google account and Shama is in my circles on Google+, articles that she shares are deemed more relevant to me. When I log out of my Google account, this article no longer appears on the first page of search results. If you want to try this experiment yourself, try searching your own name while logged in and then while logged out. Google Search plus Your World Google’s new… read more
How (and Why) to Integrate SEO and Google+
November 18, 2011 - Posted by Shama Kabani
Why should you apply SEO to Google+? Google tends to rank its own properties (YouTube, Google Places, etc) higher in search results than all the other websites on the internet. Since the introduction of Google+, Google has been learning toward offering Google+ pages and posts high in the search results – often on the first page. It makes sense to place some optimized links and keywords on your page or profile to improve your search engine rankings on Google. But how? SEO for your Google+ profile This is your SEO headline and meta description. The title is your name, which is already optimized since Google makes you use your real name. If you’re a business or a blog with a personal profile, Google+ will come and get you (and make you get a business page instead…not the end of the world, but you’ll still have to start over from scratch)…. read more