Kumo Search Engine

It remains to be seen if the Kumo search will revolutionize search as a new visual search medium , or whether it will merely try to integrate with and leverage the latest and greatest social media technology . From a search engine optimization perspective, the new technology may mean new rules, such as tweaking out friend feed, twitter, or Tumblr to maximize your brand’s continued freshness on social media.

Right now, Microsoft only claims 8% of the search traffic,way behind Google’s 65% lion’s share of the search traffic marketplace.  While there have been rumours leaked about the rebranding of Windows Live Search for quite a while now, it seems that the a newly branded Microsoft search engine is a reality. Microsoft will have to find a viral way to truly compete with Google and Yahoo to get greater share of search traffic volume – a mere rebranding of irrelevant content will not be enough.

Microsoft Search Engine

Kumo.com is only available for beta participants so far, so you can’t use it until the “softies” have had their turn of stomping out all of the bugs.  You can rest assured, however, that as soon as their algorithm is roughly sorted out, SEO preferences will lean in the direction of whatever Kumo finds the tastiest. Here’s a sample from CNet of the full extent of Kumo Search Results

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This type of “productization” of my knowledge is one of the goals I push my clients toward regularly (you know who you are!).  I, too, have suffered from the malaise that my most meaningful content is hard to separate myself from.

Perhaps this medium can allow me to do so.  Now, onto the meaningful SEO tips !

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Today, we’re going to learn about the most important part of SEO, the on-page content.  First, content should be written for people, and not for the search engines.  But, your content should be written in such a way that the search engines can tell what your site is actually about.

In order to do this, make sure to use the <title >, <h1 >, and <h2 > tags to contain your targeted keywords.  Also, make sure to use your keywords in your text.  Your target keyword density should be between two and four percent.

Unfortunately, there’s no “perfect” density. But, too scant a density, and the search engines won’t realize that your page is relevant.  Too high a density, and Google will penalize you for spamming.

One easy way to increase or decrease your keyword density, is replacement of pronouns.  If your density is too high, replace your keyword with a pronoun and reduce the density.  If your keyword density is too low, find your use of pronouns when referring to your keyword, and use your actual keyword in its place.

What other Internet Marketing questions can I answer?  Leave a comment and tell me your ideas for future blog posts!

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is simply the percentage of your text that consists of your keyword or your keyword phrase.  For example, if your keyword phrase is “internet marketing ”, and you have 100 words on your page.  A singular occurrence of “internet marketing” would be 2% of your copy.  Say it twice, and now you’re up to 4%, very close to being considered “spammy”.  A quick way to dilute your keyword density is simply to add more copy.

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• What the heck are permalinks
• Why would I care about optimizing them?
• Will I have to undergo expensive surgeries in order to optimize?

What’s SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the science, or art (in many cases) of tweaking things in your favor with the search engines.  No one can “guarantee” top rankings on search engines, because the method by which Search Engines work is not completely known and changes constantly.  In fact, Google even employs real people to validate search engine results – they dig through popular search terms to make sure that people aren’t accidentally getting “bad things” to the tops of the ranks and ruin their good name.

Which brings us to the …

Two Types of SEO

Off-Page SEO

Off Page SEO is when you do things to build in-bound links through any of a variety of methods.  Things like link-directories, link-swapping, and article marketing are all effective ways of building inbound links, thus off-page SEO .

On-Page (or On-Site) SEO

On-page SEO is the type of optimization you can perform on your page of which you are in complete control.  This type of SEO pertains to things like using good keywords in the body and title your pages, having sufficient keyword density and linking to other pages within your site using frequently sought keywords, and the like.

Google takes a look at many on-page factors when determining what makes a page relevant for a certain search term.  One of those factors is the URL of the page itself.  If the URL of the page contains the words that people are searching for, Google lends just a smidge (since there are so many factors) more weight to the likelihood that your page will be found as relevant for the sought keyword.

Here’s an example:

http://Using-Twitter.com/blog/How-To-Retweet

Now, when people are searching for things like “Twitter How To Retweet ” or “Using Twitter Retweet ” or similar phrases, that page will be considered more relevant for those terms because those words (and sometimes complete phrases) are matched perfectly in the URL.

Knowing what you know now… how does a URL like THIS compare?

http://Using-Twitter.com/blog/?p=7

Exactly. ICK!   Which brings us to…

What’s a Permalink?

“Permalink” is an abbreviated form of the phrase “Permanent Link.”  In WordPress, it’s simply the URL someone would use in order to directly link to a specific page in your site.  It’s also the URL that Google will (or won’t) send people to when they search for your targeted keywords.

How do I optimize Permalinks?

WordPress is very configurable, and as such, there’s an easy way to set your URLs to be far more meaningful to the search engines.

1. Open the URL “<YourBlogUrl>/wp-admin/options-permalink.php”So, for the site mentioned above, the link would be

   http://Using-Twitter.com/blog/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

2. In the “Common Settings” section, select the radio button marked “Custom Structure”.
3. In the big text box over to the right of “Custom Structure”, enter this value: “/%postname%/” (without the quotes)
4. Click the “Save Changes” button at the very bottom to put those new setting in to effect.
5. MOST IMPORTANT: Visit your home page and click a few URLs to make sure the new ones look like you expect.  If not, repeat the steps above more closely.

PLEASE NOTE: If you’re using a crappy hosting provider (such as GoDaddy), you will have to wait about 10-15 minutes for your changes to take effect.  Make sure to make these changes during slow traffic periods or after hours.  Better yet, switch your hosting company to one that doesn’t suck .

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The question is “Why are your domain names so long, with all those dashes in them? Should I be doing that as well?” (A domain name is the .com, .net, or .org part of a web site address – aka URL)

The “right” answer to this question depends significantly on how you intend to drive traffic to your site.

Best Domain Names for Offline Media

If you plan on using radio or television advertising, it is important to be able to make sure your domain name gets heard properly, and then subsequently typed into their browser when they get back to the computer. Combine that with being billed by air time, and you don’t want to waste time having to say the words “dash” between every word. You also want something catchy, rather than your company name. Like WinAFreeTrip.com or FreeCreditReport.com and so forth.

Best Domain Names for SEO

If you plan on using Search Engine Optimization to drive traffic to your site, you have a different battle. You see, people don’t actually type your URL in when using search engines, they just click on a link in the search results. If your domain name looks like spam, searchers will ignore it in the search results. If your domain name has nothing to do with what they’re looking for, they’ll ignore it as well.

But, here’s something interesting that few people realize, but it is VERY important to understand when creating a domain name. Google (and others) believe that the text used to link to your site/page is very descriptive of what will be found there. So when someone links to a page with the phrase “As Stupid as George Bush ”, it increases the chances that someone will find your page when searching for exactly that.

That’s the first piece of the puzzle – the next piece is that frequently, whether in forum postings, news releases, or what-have-you, people just type the full link to where they want you to go. The posting software automatically converts that into a link to your site. So when someone posts a link to your site using your domain name, the search engine sees that the words in the domain name are what someone will find there.

Let’s put that all together – if you have figured out that the people who you will sell your products best to are looking for information on Fog Horn Parts and you want to get search engines traffic to your site. You will do quite well to name your domain Fog-Horn-Parts.com . If .com isn’t available, .net, .org, .info, and .us are all possibilities.

What Google Sees

As a result, when someone links to your site with the text http://www.Fog-Horn-Parts.com , it will link to your site, and the search engines will see that “http www fog horn parts com” is what can be found at your site (turning the weird punctuation into spaces). You would do well, also, when possible, to leave out the “www” part – this wastes a word and distracts the search engine. You NEED the “http://” part to make the link work, so there’s no getting around that, I’m afraid.

You may ask yourself if people really do this – well, here are two real world examples linked to a site run Nina Hershberger who runs MegaBucks Marketing and makes a product called the wallet mailer:

• http://www.dankennedy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=234&Itemid=200 links with the text “www.wallet-mailer.com”
• http://www.marketingbestpractices.com/Articles/a-most-amazing-direct-mail-letter.htm links with the text “http://www.wallet-mailer.com”

The result of these two links combined with the intentional choice of domain names for Nina’s site results in her site ranking ever so slightly better for the search “Wallet Mailer”, for which she has been coming up number one for several years now. And that’s where I come in. I largely do that through keyword research, article marketing, and a variety of on-page optimizations. (By the way: I use a LOT of pseudonyms, so you won’t be able to track my entire customer list, just by searching for my name.)

Now when someone wants a wallet mailer, Nina doesn’t even have to give them the domain name – all she has to say is “Look up ‘wallet mailer’ on Google, I’m the first link. ” While that’s a great claim for those in the right market, do not get yourself hyped up under the false impression that you can get to this point with such terms as “home loans” or “mortgage” without a tremendous budget behind you to build and maintain such a ranking.

To further justify this advice, some of the top press release and free-reprint-article publishers out there will absolutely not post articles that contain custom linking. They will only generate links back to your site when a full URL is typed into the article. So, you get a link. But the link text will only be your URL – so, the words in your URL have to count. That’s not to say that a link is meaningless. Sure, every link helps, but it makes a lot more sense to make it count as much as possible for your specific target keywords.

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