A lot of people used to believe that the use of negative terms such as “cheap” will have a negative impact on a company’s products and services. However, with the post by Tom Crandall in iMedia Connection showed how this term is actually beneficial to SEO.

There are lots of instances. In an article in the same website published last year by Craig Macdonald cited how the phrase “cheap airfare” is worth around $8 in comScore. Another phrase is “cheap insurance” which gets around 673,000 queries per month according to Google Adwords. The phrase “cheap car” will also not lag behind with 1 million queries per month.

The good thing with incorporating the word “cheap” into your website is that it gets almost instant returns when integrated wisely with products and services. Tom Crandall provided an example.

As with hotels, competition for the keyword set “cheap rental car” is thick. As you can see on the below screenshot, the first ad displayed for this term, by aggregator CarRentals.com, offers daily rentals for seven major car rental brands as low as $8.98 a day. When I searched the company’s database for the cheapest advertised rates on its homepage, the touted deal turned out to be a sham.

For example, the company’s homepage boasts a daily rate of $7.43 at LAX from Feb. 28 to March 14. When I searched for the cheapest rate within the dates advertised, the lowest rate offered was $26 per day on a weekly rental through Deluxe Rent A Car. The same held true for every special offer I searched. Regardless, this bait-and-switch tactic may convert a fair amount of business for CarRentals.com because the customer is already on its website and just wants to book a reservation without further delay or frustration.

One brand that has no qualms about positioning itself for the “cheap car rental” niche is Fox Car Rental. Fox Car Rental uses its title tags, description tags, keyword tags, and homepage marketing copy to optimize for “cheap car rental,” “cheap car rentals,” and “cheap car rental rates.”

Here’s the Google search results page for “cheap car rental.”

Adjectives such as “affordable” and “low-cost” may be good for sales copies but nothing really beats “cheap”. Think about it. Will you go out of your way and use words such as “inexpensive” in your search for products and services. Definitely not. You will use the ordinary word “cheap”. Just take note of this user search behavior in mind and you will never go wrong.

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When I have been surfing the internet for the latest SEO news, I came across this unique list on how to rank in Twitter for a keyword entitled “5 Steps to Ranking #1 on Twitter“. But I’m wondering what does the author mean for ranking #1. Rank where? The Twitter directory? The search engine? or the top Twitter user list?

The author of the said article indicated five ways on how to ‘increase the ranking’ of a person. He cited the name, username, bio, account activity and number of followers. I agree with him that to be able to achieve maximum potential in Twitter, one must optimize a keyword in all these areas. But what he failed to point out is the different forms of search on Twitter.

Search on Twitter is not one-dimensional. It is not as direct as search engines. Twitter can be searched in various areas such as trends, hash tags, and directories. I think the author failed to point out in the area on which his tips will be more useful.

I also tried the effectiveness of Twitter in ranking in search engines. I have found out how personalities such as Britney Spears, TechCrunch and Kevin Rose have their Twitter profiles in the top 10 rankings when their name is searched.

I have also tried it on myself and yielded the same rankings.

With this, we can say that Twitter can contribute to ranking for certain brands. But how about keywords? I think this can be effective if you put keywords in your username or bio. With hashtag search, you will be associated with a particular term and you may build your credibility on a certain topic based on Twitter conversations. However, I have only tested the search engines on brand search and not on direct keyword search. As for directories, people can control the niche they are associated with because they can freely choose which categories should they belong to.

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We have been continuously tackling branding here at SEO tops. And we did for good reason. Even if we tried to deny it, branding is now evolving and may become the next ‘big thing’ in the upcoming years. We have seen Twitter expand and how brands have utilized social media for marketing. We have seen Google update its algorithm with the new focus on branding. We have also heard news from major networks that online television and radio advertising will take its toll in the next months. But what is branding anyway?

Branding is not the name nor is it the logo. It is the very essence of the company’s products and services. It stirs emotions, perceptions and impressions. It creates a perspective and triggers the imagination of its target audience. It is way more than having the right domain name or the right image. It is the shared meanings and associations people create with the brand.

As Martin Lindstrom, the author of “Buyology:The Truth and Lies about Why We Buy” said.

Effective branding leverages emotion, interaction, experience, desire, ritual, faith, and our senses (the more the better). The brain scan results from study after study showed that subjects’ brains reacted to strong brands the same way they react to emotional or even spiritual experiences.

So branding is so much more. It is not enough that you get your name out there. You must tell the people what your company stands for and how your products and services will affect their lives. Of course, since you are not perfect, you will not be able to please all. But if you instilled in their minds that you can please them, they will be convinced by that and believe it.

But what does branding have to do with search? As Lance Loveday said in his post in Search Engine Land entitled “Search:Too Boring for Branding“, search is just way too different from branding. He illustrated this through a commercial of Starburst which he saw on television.

It was easy to imagine being the funny-looking guy, chewing the candy yourself (touch), savoring the flavor (taste) and inhaling the aroma (smell) with your llama-esque nose.

But on search, everything is different. All one gets is this advertisement written in plain text. No emotions, no images. Although search have been proven by some people to contribute to the power of branding, it merely strengthens and does not establish the brand. The brand is only established after the click. As Lance Loveday puts it,

It’s what you do “after the click” that really counts

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As the Google team tries to come up with Universal search where it integrates traditionally separated search features such as images, maps, books, video and news, it now resorted to eye tracking studies to formulate its algorithm. Eye tracking studies is not new. In fact, it has been used all over the internet to determine the focus of a particular user. As indicated in the Stanford study, there is an assumption that the more time the eyes rest on a particular element on the screen, the more exposure that element gains. However, the question here is if the time it takes the eyes to rest upon an object really equates to the focus of the user on the object.

The eye tracking study that the Google team conducted aims to determine the search results that immediately meet the eye of the searcher. The results showed that the users tend to focus their eyes more on the first result and decrease as it goes downwards. Images and videos do not affect their scanning behavior. The only exception is when a particular title in the results managed to catch the eye of the user.

Eye Tracking Heatmap

The results in the study are reasonable. People do have the tendency to rest their eyes on the first object and decrease as the page moves down. Also, users focus more on text rather than images.

The Stanford study of eye behavior in web pages showed similar results. People tend to focus on text first and only focus on images 22% of the time. Banner ads also receive a lot of attention as indicated by the 1 second focus of users on the object.

But the question here is whether or not focus equates with eye behavior. Joseph Carrabis in his article “Eye-Tracking Studies: Just Say ‘No!’” have this idea that where the eye is pointing to is not necessarily where the mind is focused on. This idea now questions the results of the eye tracking studies conducted by Google and Stanford.

Also, there is also little consideration of loading time. Sometimes people tend to focus on the first object of the page since the page takes time to load. But this does not mean that the person is particularly interested in the first element. Another thing is the focus on text. Maybe this happens because the person has the motivation to read and not view images.

The study provides a good background on how to predict users’ browsing behavior. However, its results are not final. Unless they can read the mind of their users, they cannot really predict which elements on a webpage are more focused on.

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Yahoo filed a patent of an automated SEO application this January, 2009. Full information about it can be seen in the United States Patent and Trademark Office. At first, this may sound very enticing for it will limit the SEO work of web developers. This elicits the idea that they do not have to go through the trouble of optimizing their site just to get recognized by the search engines. However, this application seems to pose more problems than solutions.

The creation of the application is done with the aim to improve search engine optimization on web pages. It will help web developers by doing the SEO process for them.  This involves a string of automated processes that does keyword analysis through the frequency of searches.

The process starts as Yahoo takes note of the search queries. It will look at factors such as browsing activity, search query logs, and the search log database to determine popular concepts or units. These are all done by semantically relating terms with each other. The concepts that will come out will be used as the main keyword. This will then be automatically optimized in a particular website.

After getting the keyword, it now proceeds to perform the search engine optimization process. It does this by simply replacing the important parts of webpages automatically. These parts are the titles, headings, alt text and link text.

Let’s look at an example so you can understand the process better. For example, you have a blog related to internet marketing. If you are targeting the term, you may come up with the title “Internet Marketing” for your site and optimize all other areas such as H1 tags, alt text and the likes. When Yahoo runs its application, it will gather all related terms to “internet marketing”. In one instance it may get “guerilla marketing” as a popular term. With this, your title tags, H1 tags and alt tags will automatically transform to “guerilla marketing”. Why? That is because that is the popular term.

On one hand, you can see that Yahoo is actually helping you get ranked on a term with greater traffic. But on the other hand, it automatically shifts your target audience. This can become very problematic especially for web developers who want to rank for long-tail terms. Also, since the keywords are shifted automatically, the same sites can be expected to dominate in each popular search term because the keywords change all the time.

I think the idea behind this application is intelligent but limited. It does not understand that SEO is done so a website can serve targeted audiences rather than receive more traffic. It is not surprising though. It is just an example on how a search engine such as Yahoo views the search engine optimization process.

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Many webmasters spend entirely too much time stressing over their page’s Google rank. Unless you’re only building the site in order to flip it to the highest bidder, then more than likely you’re stressing yourself out over nothing. Google page rank is not the miracle solution that it is hyped up to be.

If you have an e-commerce site, for example, do you think your potential clients are looking for a high page rank? Or, do you think they’re looking for a good deal on what you’re selling and for a site they feel they can trust? Chances are that a good percent of them don’t even have the Google toolbar, or know what page rank really is. I really doubt that if you have the right traffic finding their way to your site, that you’re losing any sales or revenue by having little or no color in the PR bar!

Some SEO “experts” even fall into this trap. Of course, if the client is dead-set on increasing their page rank, then sometimes they have no choice but to strive for that. But, the true SEO star knows that page rank isn’t everything. More importantly, work should consistently be done to improve the quality, traffic, and in some cases the security, of the site.

I agree totally with what SEOabc said… “Get back to the basics: Great content + On page factors + Links. PR will usually follow after”. Notice that linking is listed last; I’ve seen sites that have very few back-links receive an increase in Google page rank. Making sure your site offers something of value to your visitors, and not ignoring those tedious little things like meta’s, titles, and page structure should always be the first concern for your SEO efforts.

photo credit

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When considering what to put in your Meta Description, it’s important to know how to write for people so that they will have something interesting to read along with having your keywords in such a way that the search engines will pick up on them as well.

No matter what type of site you have, you will want to make sure that the keywords you are targeting are located in the meta description in a natural flowing way.  If you have a hard time writing like this, you can always hire someone to write them for you so that you end up with the best possible meta description you can have.  Just be sure to include your keyword list so that your writer can implement them for you.

Try getting your main keywords in the first few words of your meta description.  If you are targeting both the plural and singular version of the word, you can use this “|” to break them up.  You can make it interesting reading to real people by using descriptive words to go along with your keywords and work them in so that it will be beneficial for both the reader and the search engine.

Don’t spam your meta description with unnecessary keywords.  For instance, if you sell kites on your website, you could say: The largest collection of kites including butterfly kites, animal kites, and 3 dimensional kites.  What you don’t want to say is:  Kites, Kite, Walmart kites, Target kites and more can be found on our kite site.  By using these keywords in your description, you will only be hurting your SEO efforts, not helping them at all.

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Dmoz the worlds greatest and largest human edited directory has been a debatable subject on all terms in our community but what really are the SEO effects of getting listed in one of the worlds most reliable directories.

Well to begin with if you dont already know DMOZ is a human edited directory meaning that the editors will only accept top quality sites related to there industry, this has caused not only caused a lot of knit picking but it feels as though somewhat alot of favouristism has been awarded to say for example “editors friends”. Lets just put it this way if you are looking to get listed in a freelance area of the directory and the editor also owns a freelance site and may see you as competition then there is no way they will accept you. We feel that although DMOZ can create could quality links as alot of directories extract listing from there, including google. Dmoz has nowaday become somewhat of a black market whereas if you know the right people or have the right funds your going to get listed just CLICK HERE and take a look at this its terrible.

Our conclusion is that Dmoz a few years ago was well worth every effort and can still get you a heck of alot of backlinks, but you should not become obsessed with getting listed instead concentrate more on your link building campaigns and overall if you stick at it you wont feel you need DMOZ at all.

Remember if you want to rank well, getting listed in one site wont do this for you so:

D = Do,

M = More,

O = Optimization

Z = Zestfully

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Many of the website owners who strive to attract more visitors to see their product reviews and/or buy their services would do just about anything to become the number 1 result in the search engines on certain keywords. Sometimes, one might think that being 1 is all it takes to increase the online sales (which is obviously not the only way and sometimes not the most efficient one). Also, such people might actually talk about things like “I got a SEO company working for me and they’re getting me to the top in 3-4 weeks”. But doesn’t that sound a bit too strange to you?Google official website states that hiring people for SEO is great, until you are promised to become the top in the search results in a limited period of time. In fact, when you hear things similar to that, it means, you are contacting the wrong company as there is no such thing as guaranteed results in the SEO business. So, watch out for SEO companies that claim to provide guaranteed rankings, or companies that say they have some privileges with Google, or pronounce themselves to be capable of doing a “priority submition” to Google – this is a piece of advise from Google itself

Not everybody is so outthere with learning the latest IT trends to keep up with the technology breakthroughs. But when such a lack of knowledge is combined with the entrepreneur’s strive for success – the results might be dangerous or sometimes even damaging – damaging the reputation of a business, its good name, its future online development. This means, the business owners have to look carefully for those who help their online presence expand. It’s like you never go to a bad car repair service, you find the best one that meets both your needs and your spending expectations. It’s the same kind of attitude one should apply when searching for the SEO services.

So if you are looking for a company to help you out please tread carefully and wisely as there are alot of SEO cowboys that would be willing to take your money without doing any hard labour. But do note that there are alot of  genuine good SEO companies which you can benefit from

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Hey as you know we are kicking off a new blog to give advice, updates and news on any thing related to Search engine optimization – we will also be throwing in freebies now and again for our loyal visitors.

To start off with we will be discussing the basic SEO principles that should be performed

 1. Do your keyword research before you even create your website or online business, try to find the most relevant searched keywords for your business – look at how many searches that keyword gets and most importantly look at the competition. There is no point trying obtain keywords such as “Dating” in the first year of your site as this is near to impossible to be achieved due to the mass amount of competition. A good free keyword tool to get you started is located at Free Keyword Tracker. Then go to register your domain, try obtaining a domain that is specific to your chosen keyword and register yor domain for atleast 3 years this way you will build up more trust than a yearly registered domain

2. Once you have chosen your keywords, then comes the design and implementation process – this is where you can carefully make the site SE friendly and write your initial unique content – although onsite optimization is not considered very important anymore we still believe it plays a major part in the overall ranking of a site so complete your meta tags, description and keywords. Once your site is complete make sure is is fully validated by using the W3 Validator.

 3. Now comes the process of getting your rankings so you will need to get plenty of links back to your site, the way to do this is to write unique content that webmasters will link back to, try to get links from relevant sites so if you have a dating site obviously get links from related sites. Although directory submissions have lost weight we still feel these are important in non paid directories – try to slow down the link process, do not be in a rush as you may get penalised if you try to get rankings within a month – SEO is a long and hard process and if done correctly is very rewarding. The main aim to concentrate on is to write unique content take park in discussions in forums etc – try to submit your site to the social media sites (this will be discussed at another time).

Good Luck on all you SEO efforts

P.S For all visitors we thought we would chuck in a freebie on the first post, so we have got our hands on a powerful freelancer script so just download upload and configure your mysql Powerful Freelancer Script

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