How Does the Heat Index Work?

How Does the Heat Index Work? - A national heat wave is expected to reach its peak today, as temperatures along the East Coast rise into the 90s and 100s. To make things worse, the high humidity has produced heat indexes of between 110 and 120. What's the "heat index," and how does it work?

The heat index tells you how hot it feels at a given humidity. Moist air feels hotter than dry air because it makes sweating less efficient. On a hot, dry day, your sweat will evaporate quickly and cool your skin; under humid conditions, sweat evaporates more slowly and doesn't do as much. Just as the wind chill attempts to measure how cold it feels under certain wind conditions, the heat index tries to measure how hot it feels given the humidity.

The formula for heat index is based on work completed in the late 1970s. R. G. Steadman wrote a paper called "The assessment of sultriness," in which he used a list of 20 factors to compute how hot you might feel on a given day. These factors included the rate at which you sweat, the type of clothes you're wearing, the surface area of your body, and what you happen to be doing.

Feelin' hot, hot, hot!

To isolate the effects of temperature and humidity on the perception of heat, Steadman invented a typical situation: A person who's 5 feet 7 inches and weighs 147 pounds walks at about 3.1 miles per hour in a light breeze, wearing long pants and a short-sleeved shirt. Then Steadman filled out his 20 variables with information from this scenario and figured out how hot his fictional person would feel at different outside temperatures and levels of humidity. He put the results in a table: Higher humidity would make his exemplar feel hotter, while drier conditions would make him feel cooler than it really is. For any given temperature, there is a percent humidity at which the weather "feels" exactly as hot as the thermometer indicates.

Meteorologists with the National Weather Service used Steadman's table to derive a simpler formula for heat index by creating a function that approximates its values (to within 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) using only two variables—temperature and percent humidity. Since the formula incorporates all of Steadman's assumptions, how hot you feel may differ from the heat index reported on the evening news. For example, weather reports say that today's heat index in New York City is 106, and that the wind is blowing at 11 miles per hour. But the formula for heat index assumes that the wind is blowing at only 5.8 miles per hour—so the added breeze might make it feel cooler than what's been reported. (Unless it were really hot out—when it gets up into the high 90s, the wind actually makes you hotter.) Likewise, the further your dimensions are from 5 feet 7 inches and 147 pounds, the less likely you are to feel like it's 106 degrees. ( slate.com )

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Why and How to Rank in Image Searches

Why and How to Rank in Image Searches - One aspect of search that doesn't get discussed often enough is image search. It's such a huge part of search and the daily habits of web surfers all over the world, it's amazing how little a ttention is actually paid to it when it comes to marketing and
optimization.

Some Image Search Stats to Chew On

Google Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman dropped somefacts at SES. 300 million digital photos are taken every day. 100 billion images are taken per year. There were half a trillion images in circulation by 2009. That's the past up to the present. Do you think it's going to slow down? Pittman says there were 800 million camera phones sold last year, and there may be more images online than web pages.

On Google there are hundreds of millions of image searches every day. Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting says that image search makes up about 5.7% of all Google searches. "We estimate that up to 15% of all search is image related," he says.

Why Image Search is So Important

If the above information wasn't enough to convince you of the importance of image search, consider this. When images appear in blended search results (such as Google's universal search), the images affect what is clicked on the results page. Enge says an eye tracking study proved this, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. The image is obviously going to catch your eye, regardless if it's the top result or the 5th.

Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager for Bing says that engagement is quite high when it comes to image search. Consumers looking for images also end up visiting a lot of web pages. In many cases, images can simply speed up the decision process on the consumer's part. You can see why this would be effective in eCommerce. "When users are expecting images in a search session it actually increases the speed of a searchers task," says Schwartz. "Images simply speed decision making." He would know. Bing is the "decision engine."

Tips for ranking in Image Search

In a post about ranking in "five other Google engines," I cited some tips from Search Engine Journal's Dev Basu, who recommended the following for image SEO:

• Add images to your Google Local Business profile
• Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
• Add images to local business citation sources.
• Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

Schwartz says for Bing, you should name the images properly and upload product categories for eCommerce images.

Enge suggested some even more basic tried and true SEO tactics that should still be applied. Include alt attributes in tags. Name files appropriately, and consider the nearby text, overall page context, links, title tags, etc. This stuff is all good, but you should know that the way search engines are handling images is evolving.

How the Search Engines Handle Images

Pittman says it's no longer just about looking at tags and stuff, at least at Google. "We now use computer vision and search to find similar images, object recognition, and facial recognition," he says. "We look at everything such as exposure data to help determine the quality of an image. If your image quality is low your photos will not rank as high. If you make only a thumbnail of an image it won't rank as well as a larger image of the same subject." (Emphasis added.)

Back in June, Google released a fascinating research paper that looked at building a web-scale landmark-recognition engine. The goal is to get computers to recognize landmarks (for example, the Eiffel Tower, the Lincoln Memorial, or the example Google shares - the Acropolis). This is no easy task when the engine has to rely on images of the landmarks, which are incredibly varied by angle, lighting, photo quality, etc.

This was just a research paper, and not a Google product, but one can only imagine where this research will lead with regards to how Google handles image searches.

The image filters that search engines use are worth paying attention to. If you're trying to sell products especially, it could help to consider where you want your images to rank. Google lets users search images by size, type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing), and color (full color, black and white, specific color).

Bing lets users browse results by size, layout, color, style, and people. That is in addition to the query-specific options you get.

As far as regular web searches, Bing and Google both present a number of options for users to refine their searches. Bing of course has the explore window, which for many queries, provides multiple categories. Google has its search options. Images are included in that.

Just like with any content, there is always concern that stolen material will rank higher than the original source. Pitman was asked about this at SES with regards to images. He said that image search ranking is largely dependant on how often that image is clicked on for the search query being done. He says Google is trying to combat "hotlink spam."

Social Media and Images

Social media accounts for a huge amount of the pictures on the web. Not only do you have sites like Flickr and Picasa, but there are so many people uploading so many photos to Facebook and MySpace, not to mention apps like TwitPic for Twitter.

Believe it or not, real-time search plays a vital role in image search, just as in regular search. People want up-to-the-minute information, and that often comes in the form of images. Some real-time search engines are expanding how they handle media like images and video.

Perhaps the more significant part of this equation is the reputation management factor. Real-time search helps in this regard, when you're trying to protect your reputation, but good old-fashioned Google searches are vital too.

"Think about the pictures that your employees are putting up on social sites," says Liana Evans, Director of Social Media at Serengeti Communications. "Images can hurt your business reputation."

Conclusion

There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to images on the web. A couple other things that we didn't really touch on are SafeSearch filters and Creative Commons licensing. These are
things you should explore further if you think they will affect you. There is plenty of info out there about both.

One other thing I'd like to mention is that Google's Insights for Search analytical tool now includes image search data. This could be a very useful tool for anyone looking to improve their
performance in image search. ( www.webpronews.com )

READ MORE - Why and How to Rank in Image Searches

On - Page Optimization Tactics - You Don't Hear About Backlinking

On - Page Optimization Tactics - You Don't Hear About Backlinking - backlinking, backlinking - it seems to be the only part of SEO anyone ever talks about these days! Let's get our noses out of everybody else's sites and back into ours.

On-page optimization is often overlooked and neglected, but your on-page SEO builds the foundation for all of your off-page optimization efforts. We're going to cover some of the basics here: domain names and title tags, but we're also going to get to topics less discussed when dealing with on-page optimization. I'm talking about things like stemming, your outbound links, your use of synonyms and more. Let's get to it!

On-Page Optimization Tactics

Domain Name

Your domain name has a powerful effect on how you rank. Having an EMD (exact match domain) for your keyword is going to do a lot for your ranking. However, this is not crucial to your ranking success. Many people, such as myself, choose to have a domain name that they can brand. It depends on what you're looking to do with your site. If you want to make a small niche site targeting a single keyword, then clearly you will want to get an EMD.

But what if the EMD is not available?

This is a very common problem for internet marketers. From a SEO standpoint, you want to choose an EMD with a non-.com extension first if available. If none are available, then tack another word onto the end of your domain name. You will still have your keyword in your domain and receive SEO benefits from this. For the record, it is better to start your domain with your keyword first. For example, it would be better to choose "dogtraineronline.com" rather than "mydogtrainer.com".

Another trick is making your domain name the plural or non-plural version of your keyword. Google now uses a process called "stemming" that understands plurality and "ing" endings on words among other things. If you add plurality to your domain name, you will rank almost as effectively as for the non-plural version. These same principles can be applied to your title tags, header tags, and meta tags.

Title and Header Tags

We're going to apply the same ideas to our title and header tags. You want to include your keyword, but you can't always just use your keyword. In this case we are going to do the same thing we did with our domain name. Put your keyword first then add more text. Also, with stemming in mind, you can use different tenses or plurality for your keyword. There is also another clever strategy you can use to rank for your keyword without even using it!

Ranking with Synonyms

People don't talk about this too often, but Google actually considers synonyms when choosing results for queries. What does this mean? It means that you can rank for the word "manual" with the word "instructions". Do a Google search right now, seriously right now! Pick a word (manual if you'd like) and put a ~ in-front of it. Example search: ~manual. Every bolded word in the results page is considered to be a synonym. This means that using these words more often is going to help you rank for your keyword as well. They are like super-related LSI keywords.

Text Formatting

There are ways to optimize your text besides keyword density. Text formatting is using bold, italics, font-size, and word placement to improve the relevance of your page to your keyword. Making your keyword bold and/or increasing its font-size will add importance to it in the eyes of the Search Engines. Also, where you put your keyword has an effect as well. Placing your keyword in the first and last sentence of a body of text will improve the relevance of your page as well. With this in mind, here's how you can make a super-optimized blog-post or article:

• Place your keyword in the title
• Include your keyword in the first and last sentences
• Bold your keyword both times
• Wrap your keyword in the first and last sentences with h1 and h2 tags respectively

and here's the final tip for internal linking or backlinking

5) Use your keyword as anchor text AND bold it

This last trick gets ignored a lot. It's a great way to add even more influence to the importance of your keyword and get more out of your anchor text. These are the little steps that people who say on-page optimization doesn't really matter either forget or don't know about.

The biggest on-page optimization blunder of all is negligence of your link profile and how you link out. The links leading to your site aren't the only ones that affect how you rank!

Outbound Links

How you link out to other sites affects how Google trusts and ranks your site. In the TrustRank white papers that included a patent adopted by Google, they mention how good sites link to other good sites. They also say that "good sites seldom link to bad ones". Use this knowledge to enhance your rankings. Link out to authoritative and trusted sites. If you have a ton of links leading to spammy sites it's going to hurt how your site ranks. You can't control who links to you, but you CAN control who you link to, so don't harm your rankings by linking to bad sites.

As an example of this principle in effect, check out Huffington Post's homepage. Their articles rank very well in the search results and they have a PR 8 homepage. If you scroll to the bottom of their site, you will see a massive amount of "dofollow" links all leading to other major, authoritative sites. It's no coincidence that they rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages). This is a clear example of a site benefiting from linking out to other good sites and gaining trust from Google.

We have complete control over our on-page SEO, and this means our content and our links. We just talked about outbound links and that leaves us with only one other type of link.

Internal Links

Internal links are the links that lead from one page on our site to another. Now is a good time to state a quick fact about search engines and how they index the web. Search engines do not index websites, they index web pages. This means that a site doesn't have authority; rather a web page has authority. The reason all the pages rank well on an authoritative website is because of internal links.

When a large authority site makes a new page, what does that page have? It has a ton of powerful links from other authoritative pages already on the site. This all occurs because of internal linking. So what does it mean for us? It means we need to have a solid internal link-structure to take advantage of our own link juice.

There's no exact science to how you link your pages. Just having a consistent nav-bar is a start, but there is a lot more you can do. If you use Word Press, there are many different related posts plug-ins you can use that will automatically create links to other related posts for you. I recommend having more internal links than external links. A 1 to 3 ratio is a good reference for your outbound to internal links ratio.

There is a practice called PageRank sculpting that involves severely limiting the number of outbound links you have in order to keep more link juice internally. It sounds like a decent idea, but it fails in practice. PageRank moves more cyclically than recognized and a lot more will stay on your site naturally. Also, we just talked about how outbound links can help you rank - don't be afraid to link to other great sites.

Conclusion

I know that many of us have read through (and possibly purchased) countless guides on SEO and been over the same on-page optimization basics again and again. But that's the thing, they are just the basics! This is why everybody assumes that there's nothing more to it and it's deemed as less important than backlinking. Don't fall into the trap! Take care of your site, optimize the way you use your text, optimize the way you use links, prune it daily like a precious shrub. ( sitepronews.com )

READ MORE - On - Page Optimization Tactics - You Don't Hear About Backlinking

To A Great SEO Campaign

To A Great SEO Campaign - The first real step to anything is research, and lots of it. The most important step to any SEO campaign is keyword research.

The first step to consider is the niche you are in, and the products or services that you are promoting. You should come up with a list of potential keywords that your customers would use to find you on the web.

After that you could use the Google keyword search tool to analyze your list, checking the competitiveness, number of monthly searches and the strength of the competitors currently on page one.

A competitive market analysis is the next important step you should take. After you have your final keyword list, create a spreadsheet with all the keywords, and then list all the competitors from page one of Google.

You could use a program like SEO quake to collect some of the data that you will need, such as their page rank, number of indexed pages, inbound links, whether or not they have a site map and much more. This will tell you how difficult and how long of an SEO campaign you will be embarking on.

Next step should be the on page SEO factors of your website.

First and foremost is content, if you are not providing quality content that solves people's problems then your efforts will be in vain. Great content will keep your visitors coming back on their own which will greatly assist your SEO efforts.

Make sure all the on page dynamics such as header tags, meta tags, alt tags for images and HTML code is done correctly.

These are the simple things that improve your 'findability'. You also want to ensure that you have a proper site map created and submitted to the search engines, this will increase your chances of all your pages being properly indexed.

Number four is off page SEO strategies.

The biggest and most important overall here is back linking. Google views every back link your site has as a vote for your site from someone else. The best back links you can get are called one way links. One way links are where another website links to you without you having to link back. Good examples of this are article marketing, blog commenting and directory submissions.

Reciprocal linking is where you link out to website a and website a in turn links back to you. These are also good links but you should only focus on the ones targeted to your niche and those having a higher page rank than you. Good back linking takes time and effort, this cannot be accomplished over night.

You should also avoid any link scams, link farms or questionable linking strategies. If you have to stop and wonder if it's ok to do it then it probably isn't.

The last step that is very crucial to your SEO success is the overall promotion of your website. There are several ways of effectively promoting your products and services via the internet.

1) Video marketing
This can be promoted in conjunction with your website or separately for added exposure.

2) Email marketing
This allows you to keep track and communicate with your customers and potential customers.

3) Web 2.0
These are blogs, hub pages, wikis and such. Also a great source of quality back links for your site.

4) Article marketing
If done correctly this will establish you as an expert and help you to generate back links and additional traffic to your offers.

5) Local search marketing such as Yahoo local and Google places
If you have a business in the offline world you certainly want to use this method to promote your business. Google places for instance typically will come up first in the search results.

These are just a few of the strategies that you can use to begin a successful SEO and web promotion campaign. The most import step you will take is to take action. Everything you do should be with the intent of growing your business.. ( entireweb.com )

READ MORE - To A Great SEO Campaign

Tips to Improve Your Search Ranking with Good Content

Tips to Improve Your Search Ranking with Good Content - One of the most important on-page SEO factors is often forgotten by many website owners – content. I like the old saying, “content is king” because it still plays a huge part in determining how websites rank in search engines. Generally, the more relevant content you can provide the better.

Other factors do play a part, such as quality, relevance and optimizing your content, but generally more is better. Why? Because search engine spiders look at the words on your website to assess its topic, content and relationship with other pages. The more content you provide the more text the search engine spider has to read and the more valuable your website will be to search engines and visitors. So here are 5 tips to keep in mind when creating search friendly content:

Tips to Improve Your Search Ranking with Good Content

Include Targeted Keywords Often

Perhaps one of the most critical factors in your websites ranking is how many times your page includes the keywords you are optimizing for. You need to be aware of exactly what phrases people use to find your website and include them regularly in your page content. By no means does this mean you should “keyword stuff” your page, but rather include your search terms in a natural manner that still maintains readability for the end user.


Write for Visitors not Spiders

Spamming your page with keywords will not only make your website unreadable by visitors, but can also harm your search engine ranking. Search engine spiders use complex algorithms to determine search rankings and can easily spot ‘spam’ pages, so make sure your page is readable by human visitors.


Add New Content Often

Adding fresh content is a great way to keep search spiders coming back regularly and a natural way to add more content for search spiders to crawl. The more content you create, the more opportunities you are providing to share your information, link to you, and increase the ranking for the optimized keywords on that page.


Don’t Repeat Yourself

Duplicate content is an easy way to get your website banned from search results as it is considered a spamming technique by search engines! Don’t take the easy way out, create unique content for each page and you should see the ranking benefits you were hoping for.


Use Formatting Elements

Search spiders rely on page formatting elements to highlight headings and important keywords. Using headline tags, bold text and bullet points are a great way to ensure your keywords stand out. Again, only highlight when necessary, and make the text look natural to search engine spiders.

Follow these simple guidelines with your content writing and you should create a website not only popular with search engines, but by human visitors too. ( blog.ineedhits.com )

READ MORE - Tips to Improve Your Search Ranking with Good Content

Website Duplicate Content - A Search Engine's View

Website Duplicate Content - A Search Engine's View - Duplicate Content Detection, the process of detecting and scoring the correlation between two or more documents on the Web, is one of the more complex problems that Search Engines solve.

Webmasters tend to overlook this issue because of its complex nature. In this article, I will briefly discuss how a Search Engine views Duplicate Content, and explain how you can take steps toward eliminating Duplicate Content issues, thus elevating your Webpages in the Search Engine rankings!

How Do Search Engines Detect Duplicate Content?

Search Engines utilize various methods to analyze Duplicate Content. Basic approaches include utilizing the so-called Levenshtein distance, or "edit distance" - i.e. how many changes need to be made to one document to make it look like the other. More complex approaches identify and eliminate common duplicate elements (Navigation Bar, Footers, and Headers) before running a vector-based comparison between two or more documents. On a large-scale, sorting documents into similar groupings and comparing those groupings tends to provide similar results.

Are Duplicate Content Penalties Fair?

From a Webmaster or SEO professional's point-of-view, Duplicate Content is typically seen as something that is "unfairly" penalized - after all, rarely do most Websites purposefully contain duplicate Webpages. For a Search Engine, when two or more Webpages are identified as "too similar", one or more of those Webpages usually disappear from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), because duplicate information is not beneficial to the Search Engine user. This often leaves Webmasters asking: what went wrong? Unfortunately, the typical corrective approach to the Webpage's disappearance tends to be overly simplistic and inadequate.
How Can I Easily Correct Duplicate Content Penalties?

Fortunately, there are tools out there that can help to identify Duplicate Content within a Website and assist in restoring the Webpage in the SERPs.

Here are some important factors to consider when selecting a tool:

• Choose tools that identify the exact percentage amount of correlation between large sets of documents, and allow you to compare each Webpage to the other Webpages in the Website. Stay away from tools that only allow you to compare two Webpages at a time.

**TIP: Correlation is best done in the context of the larger picture of the Website as a whole, as most Search Engines process at a macro scale and not a micro scale.**

• Use a tool that can quickly re-analyze the entire grouping of Webpages as a whole after you make the changes.

• Test tools with your own set of test Webpages. Create a bunch of similar Webpages and play around with content to see how the tool's algorithm works. This will let you see the limitations of the tool.

Here are some simple things that you must avoid:

1. Do not write additional content and place it in a common area that is shared. Examples of this pitfall are content placed in the Footer, Header, or Navigation Bar of a Website. This will only decrease the margin of error for Duplicate Content penalties.
2. Avoid simply changing words to their synonym counterparts. Search Engines have solved this issue long ago, and the word "bike" is typically counted as a duplicate to "bicycle".
3. Simply re-arranging words will not help either. Search Engines calculate Duplicate Content with a vector-based approach - that is, when the calculation is executed it is usually done without respect to the ordering of words.
4. Make sure each Webpage has content! Less content on each Webpage decreases the margin of error, because there are fewer words that need to be compared. Common areas like the Header, Footer, and Navigation Bar naturally dilute some of the correlations and more unique content is needed to overcome this issue.

How Serious Is Duplicate Content?

There is an even more insidious problem with Duplicate Content than the wrong Webpage being shown in the SERPs, or penalties being assessed on a Website-level. In my opinion, Link Loss is the major reason why you should avoid Duplicate Content within a Website.

Link Loss is simply the loss of Link Flow™ within a given set of Webpages (typically within a given Website or set of sub-domains). When hundreds of duplicate Webpages exist, hundreds of Link Flow "black holes" are created.

For example: If you have 100 Webpages that are too similar, Search Engines will typically show the Webpage with the highest Total Link Flow in their keyword results. The other 99 Webpages are relegated to the "scrap heap" - in other words, the other 99 Webpages will never see the light of day on the SERPs. But where does all of this scrapped Total Link Flow go? The answer is NOWHERE! The Total Link Flow of the other 99 Webpages (which mathematically could be well more than the Total Link Flow of the 1 Webpage being shown at the top) is essentially wasted.

So watch your Duplicate Content, not from a human's perspective, but from a Search Engine's perspective. After all, it is a Search Engine that ultimately "looks" at your content, and if it doesn't like what it sees, neither will you! ( addme.com )

READ MORE - Website Duplicate Content - A Search Engine's View

Here are 10 ways to royally mess up your SEO

Ten Ways to Mess Up Your SEO - I see it and hear it all the time. I speak with potential clients that claim everything was going great and then all of a sudden everything hit the fan. Rankings gone, traffic gone and business down.

Here are 10 ways to royally mess up your SEO:

1. Not asking enough questions

When you hire a search engine optimization company make sure to ask questions on process. Find out to make sure there are no black hat methods being used.

2. Dangerous Linking

A link is good but not everywhere. Linking to the wrong types of websites could land you in the hot seat very quickly. For instance, always strive to have relevant incoming links that could generate visitors to your website, not just a link for the sake of a link.

3. Forgetting to read guidelines

The search engines have strict guidelines they like all websites to follow. Does that mean that some things slip through the cracks? Yes but not for ever. Read through the search engine guidelines to understand what type of approach they like to see.

4. Black hat tricks

Don’t fall prey to cutting corners on your search engine optimization because you could find yourself in a heap of trouble. You may get some sort of search engine penalty, if you do by accident fix it. If the black hat technique was not by accident, then please stop reading this list now!

5. Having disgusting URL structures

Many times people forget to remember about their structure of their URL’s on their website. Don’t forget to keep them as clean as possible.

6. Blanketed meta info

Your meta info for each page should always be nice and unique. Blanketing the same meta title tag across the board is not going to help you long term.

7. Not enough good content

Search spiders are readers not thinkers. If you don’t have enough text they will simply skip over your website. Always have some text for them to grab onto, but always focus on the visitor experience of your site and create good quality content for your visitors.

8. Not enough link building

Link building is something that should be occurring every single month without question. Link building is what gives a website that power it needs to really start climbing through the search results.

9. Image tags

Don’t forget that there is an opportunity to show up in image search on all three search engines and your images need to be optimized for this opportunity.

10. Not using a keyword research tool

You really don’t want to sit there and try to come up with keywords yourself without using a tool because I can guarantee you will not see any search engine optimization benefits. Use a keyword research tool, such as the Google keyword research tool.

These to me are some of the more important areas to watch out for when conducting search engine optimization otherwise you could find yourself going backwards. ( searchengineoptimizationjournal.com )

READ MORE - Here are 10 ways to royally mess up your SEO

Top 10 Tips for Local Search Engine Optimisation

Top 10 Tips for Local Search Engine Optimisation - Punch Above your Weight Online - Localised search results have recently experienced a major overhaul within the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) which has resulted in a fantastic opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses.

Local search results were previously relegated to a small map, which would appear within the first page of results, but now they enjoy first page domination for local search terms.

The benefit of this to small businesses is that they can now appear above their much larger revivals who are relegated to the last few results on page one of Google.

Don't miss out on local search results; they're your next customers. Here's 10 tips to help you capture them:

1. Claim your Google Places listing

it's easy to do and if one doesn't exist for your business then you can quickly and simply create one. What is it? A Google Places listing is effectively a profile attached to Google's local search results. It is important because Google ranks these profiles above all others in their new first page local search results.

2. Add pictures to your Google Places listing.

The effectiveness of your Google places listing is impacted by its completeness. Images will not only flesh out your listing, but when they appear in the search results, besides your Google Places listing, they are eye-catching and attractive which will increase clicks.

3. Gather citations

citations are instances on the web where your business is mentioned, Google uses the consistency of the information it finds and the authority of the referring site to boost your rank in local search engine results. The quality as well as volume of citations is an important factor in local search engine optimisation.

4. Include your locality in on-page optimisation

revisit your META and Title Tags to ensure your town is included wherever possible. Make sure your address appears on every page and that you have a contact page.

5. Submit your site to local directories including Yell.com, Qype.co.uk, Hotfrog.co.uk, local Chamber of Commerce and business directories. Local directories will have greater relevance in local search as it narrows your field of operation for Google to a localised area.

6. Manage your online exposure

make sure the information distributed across the web that pertains to your business is managed carefully. Trawl local directories and existing listings, double-check that your details are correct and that they match both your Google Places contact information as well as your websites contact page.

7. Get your reviews and testimonials on the web

no doubt you will already have testimonials collected from customers, these need to go online as well as in other marketing materials. Put a process in place of asking satisfied customers to review you online if at all possible. Pen a short email with instructions of where and how you would like the review left and send this to all satisfied customers.

8. Use a local phone number instead of a 0800, 0845 or 0870 - this again refines your location making it easier for search engines to place you within a specific region.

9. Target local keywords

when link building make sure you target some local variations on your keywords in the anchor text of your links.

10. Use your supply network

think about local search as being similar to networking. No doubt you will already have a network of local contacts, associates and suppliers who all allow your business to thrive. Simply transfer this network online by linking to each other.

Local search is set to dominate first page results for all local search terms. Small, local businesses should take advantage of this by implementing some or all of the tips above which will allow them to compete with much larger businesses who have until now monopolised the first page results by investing in aggressive SEO campaigns. ( entireweb.com )

READ MORE - Top 10 Tips for Local Search Engine Optimisation

A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More

A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More - Start-ups and big companies alike have tried to take on Google by building a better search engine. That they have failed has not stopped brave new entrants.

The latest is Blekko, a search engine that will open to the public on Monday.

Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s co-founder and chief executive, says that since Google started, the Web has been overrun by unhelpful sites full of links and keywords that push them to the top of Google’s search results but offer little relevant information. Blekko aims to show search results from only useful, trustworthy sites.

“The goal is to clean up Web search and get all the spam out of it,” Mr. Skrenta said.

Users who search for a topic that Blekko considers polluted with spamlike results, like health, receive an edited list.

Blekko’s search engine scours three billion Web pages that it considers worthwhile, but it shows only the top results on any given topic. It calls its edited lists of Web sites slashtags. The engine also tries to weed out Web pages created by so-called content farms like Demand Media that determine popular Web search topics and then hire people at low pay to write articles on those topics for sites like eHow.com.

It is also drawing on a fruitful category of Web search — vertical search engines that offer results on specific topics. Many companies assume that Google won the contest to search the entire Web, so they have focused on topical search. Bing from Microsoft has search pages dedicated to travel and entertainment, and Yelp is a popular choice for searching local businesses.

People who search for a topic in one of seven categories that Blekko considers to be polluted with spamlike search results — health, recipes, autos, hotels, song lyrics, personal finance and colleges — automatically see edited results.

Users can also search for results from one site (“iPad/Amazon,” for instance, will search for iPads on Amazon.com), narrow searches by type (“June/people” shows people named June) or search by topic. “Climate change/conservative” shows results from right-leaning sites, and “Obama/humor” shows humor sites that mention the president. Blekko has made hundreds of these slashtags, and users can create their own and revise others.

Mr. Skrenta, who has been quietly building Blekko since 2007, has spent his career trying to improve Web search by relying on Web users to help sift through pages.

He started the Open Directory Project, a human-edited Web directory that competed with Yahoo in the 1990s and was acquired by Netscape in 1998. He ran three search properties at AOL and helped found Topix, the human-edited news site that was acquired in 2005 by Gannett, the Tribune Company and Knight-Ridder.

In some cases, Blekko’s top results are different from Google’s and more useful. Search “pregnancy tips,” for instance, and only one of the top 10 results, cdc.gov, is the same on each site. Blekko’s top results showed government sites, a nonprofit group and well-known parenting sites while Google’s included OfficialDatingResource.com.

“Google has a hard time telling whether two articles on the same topic are written by Demand Media, which paid 50 cents for it, or whether a doctor wrote it,” said Tim Connors, founder of PivotNorth Capital and an investor in Blekko. “Humans are pretty good at that.”

Still, for many other queries, the results are quite similar. Blekko’s challenge is that most people are happy with Google’s search results, which comScore says account for two-thirds of search queries in the United States.

“Most people aren’t saying, ‘I’m just overwhelmed with content farms,’ ” said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land and an industry expert.

Google also enables people to easily search individual Web sites or set up a custom search of a group of Web sites, though it is a more complicated process.

Blekko is also taking aim at Google’s opacity about its algorithm for ranking search results. Blekko offers data like the number of inbound links to a site, where they come from and when Blekko last searched the content of a site.

Blekko has raised $24 million in venture capital from prominent investors like Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway and U.S. Venture Partners. It plans to sell Google-like search ads associated with keywords and slashtags.

Some start-ups that have taken on search have been folded into the big companies, like Powerset, which Microsoft bought in 2008. Others, like Cuil, a search engine started by former Google engineers in 2008, were flops. Blekko’s slashtags could be subject to spam since anyone can edit them, but Blekko says it will avoid that with an editor and Wikipedia-style policing by users.

“They have an interesting spin,” Mr. Sullivan said about Blekko. “It might take off with a small but loyal audience, but it won’t be a Google killer.” ( nytimes.com )

READ MORE - A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More

Google, Bing search engines turn to music

Google, Bing search engines turn to music – Internet search engines pride themselves as being neutral providers of information.

But as competition mounts to own the connection between fans and online content, tech behemoths like Microsoft and Google increasingly are turning to their search engines to help drive their entertainment content strategies.

In June, Microsoft launched a new entertainment vertical to its Bing search engine, which among other things aggregates full-track streaming from Zune, details on upcoming tours and buy links within the results for any artist, album or song search.

Google put together a similar package last year and is now building a music download service of its own that would be tied to its search engine and Android mobile operating system.

Given the high volume of entertainment-related queries that the search engines handle, it was only a matter of time before they took bold steps into the space. According to Microsoft, 10 percent of all Internet search queries are entertainment-related, with music lyrics alone accounting for 70 percent of those searches.

With the Bing upgrades, Microsoft is trying to position itself as a better entertainment discovery tool than Google. While both Google and Bing have links to stream full songs found in search results, Bing has the more complete package with additional details on tour dates, lyrics and buy links.

However, all that may change once Google gets its music act together. Sources confirm that later this year Google will launch a music download service that's tied to its search engine. Currently, music searches on Google link to full-song streams provided by MySpace Music, as well as Twitter feeds and other information, which it launched late last year.

Exactly what Google has planned is unclear, but a hint was given during a developers conference for the company's Android mobile platform in May. At the event, Google announced the acquisition of Simplify Media, a content-synching technology that the company demonstrated can be used to automatically synch and stream music purchased online to any Android phone containing the technology.

Whether this is an interim step toward an eventual streaming subscription service is unclear, and Billboard hasn't confirmed any additional details on this point.

Potentially interfering with both plans is an increasingly aggressive effort by the recording industry to have search engines remove links to infringing material. BPI, the trade group representing U.K. record labels, raised the stakes in June by issuing a takedown notice to Google, demanding it remove links to 17 songs from third-party websites it deems infringing, such as RapidShare and MegaUpload. Google hasn't yet responded, but its next steps will be telling.

Should Google comply, it would set a precedent that will almost certainly result in a flood of additional takedown notices from every music label and publisher eager to eliminate pirate links on the world's most popular search engine. If it refuses, there could be another court fight coming as big if not bigger than the $1 billion lawsuit Viacom brought against YouTube -- which itself is heading to appeal after Google recently won a summary judgment to dismiss the case.

As for Bing, Microsoft senior VP of online services Yusuf Mehdi assures the music industry that it will comply with any takedown requests, but has no plans to alter the search algorithm that determines search results.

"We're pretty true to the algorithmic ranking in the Web results," Mehdi says. "We're obviously not going to surface that kind of stuff in the Bing box, but the algorithm that determines relevancy of search results we'll stick with."

While Bing's moves are interesting, it's Google that has the market-moving leverage. According to the most recent data from information services firm Experian Hitwise, Google's search engine in May led the pack with 72 percent U.S. market share, with Yahoo second (14.4 percent) and Bing third (9.2 percent).

But when it comes to music, all of them stand in the shadow of Apple, which still commands 70 percent of digital music download sales in the United States, according to NPD Group. While Apple has no presence in online search (yet), both Microsoft and Google are competing with Apple on the rapidly growing mobile platform -- Google with Android and Microsoft with the new Windows Series 7.

Successfully tying together a cloud-based music service with an online search and discovery system and a path to mobile phones -- not to mention advertising around it all -- is the digital content battlefield of the immediate future. ( reuters.com )

READ MORE - Google, Bing search engines turn to music

Searchers Now Have More Ways to Find Your Content

How Do Google's New Search Options Affect SEO?. Searchers Now Have More Ways to Find Your Content. Google's search options were designed to allow users to refine their searches. That means users will use these to weed out irrelevant results and better find what they're looking for.

It also means that there is a whole new set of guidelines that search engine marketers will need to think about...or does it? Perhaps it's just the same guidelines, only emphasized to the user more now, thereby making it more important than ever for marketers and web site owners to consider them. How do you intend to handle your SEO efforts with the new changes? Tell us about it.

I asked a few search engine marketing experts if they think the options will affect SEO. Here are a few responses I got:

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea says: "Web Options have the potential to impact SEO by offering a much wider range of ways to find information. Whether or not they will may have to do with whether or not searchers will take the time to click on the 'show options' link, and explore the many new ways that they can find what they may be looking for."

Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing says: "Yes! But it doesn't change the SEO advice we give: fresh content, digital asset SEO..."

"From what I am seeing, the 'search engine optimization' industry is actually turning back around to what it used to be: good old fashioned website marketing," says WebProNews Blog Partner Bill Hartzer, commenting on an SEOmoz post.

"It's not only 'optimizing a website' and 'getting links.' SEO is involving more nowadays: you have to get your site in front of real people and real traffic," he continues. "It's also about using social media marketing techniques, as well. If you're successful in social media you'll be successful in search. If you can get lots of real people to a site then you'll be successful in SEO."

In other words, it's all about optimizing for people. That's all the search engines have ever wanted, and that's all the searchers have ever wanted out of content - to be able to find what they're looking for. It's easier said than done, but all you have to do is help them find you.

So considering that, why not take a few moments to examine just what these new search options are that are available to users. Let's think about what it would take to have your site show up for each option.

Videos

Obviously, ranking for searchers using the video option is going to require the use of video. Though online video adoption has certainly grown substantially in the last year or two, many are still quick to doubt its importance despite the search engine ranking implications that have been discussed in the past. To me, it looks like it just got even more important, given that sorting by videos is the top option in Google's new search options (just below "all results" - the default option).

Based on several test queries, it looks like it's going to comedown to relevant keyword use with videos. Whether that be with videos on your own site, YouTube, or other locations. Doing video interviews with other content providers will likely work in your favor here as well.

Within the Videos option, you have the sub-option to see videos of all durations, short ones, medium-length ones, or long ones. This tells me you will probably do well to produce videos with a variety of different lengths.

Forums

The next option is to sort by forums, and this appears to be another obvious one. Participate in forums. It just so happens that I

discussed online forum participation about a week ago. To me, it's just part of the overall social media marketing package. Forums might as well be social networks, whether they are called so or not. Now that users can easily search Google by forum results, it makes more sense than ever to participate and gives you a better chance of promotion.

Just like any other form of online marketing, ethics should always be considered. It's not going to make you look good if you just go into a forum and spam it. It's about participation. Discussing topics related to your business should provide the natural flow of keywords, and potentially help you rank well in this section.

Reviews

In my test searches, "Reviews" results seem to come from pages that indicate that they are just that - reviews. This leads me to believe that you want to get your product reviewed as often as possible, or conduct reviews of other products on your site in order to show up in these results. It also tells me that you want reviews to be clearly marked as such. This tells Google that they are in fact reviews. On a sidenote, this might be a very important option to monitor from the online reputation management standpoint. If people are out there reviewing your product, this is a good place to see those reviews.

Sort them by date, and you will be able to see them from the most current, which will help you keep up with new ones. Just hope that whoever is reviewing your product is clearly marking their reviews as reviews. Pages in these results tend to say the word "review" on the page or in the title tag.

Sorting Options

Google gives users the option to see results from the past 24 hours, the past week or the past year, in addition to anytime. They also give you the option to sort by relevance or by date - a long overdue option if you ask me, and one that has been available on Google News for quite some time.

I would say that these sorting options indicate that frequent content and updates are in order if you want your content to appear here. How else are you going to rank for time-sensitive results?

Images from the Page

Users have the option to have their results show images from the page right on the SERP. This option (at least in some cases) brings up different results than if the option is not enabled. I'm going to have to make an educated guess and say that providing plenty of relevant and optimized images will help your cause when optimizing for this search option.

More Text

Under the "Images from the Page" option is the "More Text" option, which basically just provides the same results as a regular search, but includes longer snippets. I think this is just going to comedown to classic use of keywords and just good-old-fashioned good content, because just like any other snippets, keywords are bolded.

If there are more keywords within a longer snippet, that means there will be more bolded words, which could make the result stand out, but if that good-old-fashioned content isn't surrounding those keywords, they will be worthless because now the user will have more to read before they click through to your site. If it's not relevant to what they're looking for, they have a better means of realizing it before the click.

Standard Results

More Text

Related Searches

As with the sort-by options, I'd say frequent content again is key again here. Optimize for items that are related to other topics you rank for. Basically just optimize for a broad spectrum of topics related to what you do while staying relevant (btw, being deceptive will hurt you in the long run, ranking or no ranking).

Wonder Wheel

Similar to the related searches option, the Wonder Wheel gives the user a way to navigate through related searches in a more visual way. It's a graphical representation of related search terms, though they are not always the same as the ones found in "related searches." From an optimization standpoint though, I would say the same tactics would apply here.

Timeline

The Timeline groups results by dates referred to on actual pages. What this says to me is: include dates in your content when relevant. Another good thing about this is that it gives you the opportunity to get older content viewed, and in its right context. If users are using the timeline and select older dates, they're most likely looking for content from that period.

This reflects better on your site than if your older content was showing up in a regular web search, where a user might be confused into thinking the content is more current than it really is, which could ultimately have a negative impact on your reputation depending on how time sensitive the data is.

Wrapping Up

To be clear, these are just theories. To the best of my knowledge, there is no concrete answer for how to get ranked in any of these sections. We are after all talking about ranking on Google. I feel like these strategies will only increase your chances of getting found with each option though. It comes down to providing what people are looking for. Search options from Google should be applauded and embraced, because as a content provider and/or a business, you also have more options with regards to which Google results your content will be found in.

Also, keep in mind that paid listings still appear in the results for these options. The same paid listings appear regardless of which option is selected however. And don't forget that users have the ability to use multiple options at the same time. For example, reviews can be listed from most recent to oldest. ( webpronews.com )

READ MORE - Searchers Now Have More Ways to Find Your Content