Maybe it works, but seeing ads on Google for Microsoft’s new Bing search engine just doesn’t seem to send quite the right message. Plus, the ads link to a nearly blank landing page, since Bing hasn’t launched yet.

Microsoft is rumored to be spending up to $100 million to advertise the Bing launch. I wonder how much of that Google will end up getting…

There are also ads pointing to a Ning site called BingHub. I can’t imagine why whoever created it is spending cold hard cash to promote that, either.

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Google chrome, the web browser by search engine giant Google, has finally left the Beta stage with its latest release.

Google Chrome has already found a small, but very loyal, following of fans for its stability and general rendering speed.  Now it has come out of its Beta stage, and the new version 2.0 feels even faster with its page loading speeds.

If you are surprised to learn that version 2 is out, that is the one place we at StarterTech feel that Chrome falls a little short: No notifications of updates.  To learn if there is a new version of the browser, you need to click on the wrench in the top right corner, and then click on “About Google Chrome” to see if there is a ner version for you to download.  It’s a bit counter intuitive as opposed to Firefox giving you a pop-up notice everytime there is a new version.  The Chrome system isn’t quite as user friendly, but it does work.

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Over the next 2 weeks several staff from TopRank be hitting the road for multiple SEO/Social Media/PR speaking and training events. We invite you to attend and would love to meet up with readers of Online Marketing Blog. 

Topics during these events will emphasize the practice areas of our agency: Search Marketing, Online Public Relations and Social Media Marketing. Locations will range from New York to San Francisco to Minneapolis.

May 19: Media Relations Summit, Crowne Plaze Hotel in NYC (event info)

4:30 pm: Mastering SEO, Google AdWords and Other Search Tools to Increase Visibility
If you’re ready to vault your website, landing pages, corporate videos, blogs, press releases, and online newsroom into the top of the search rankings, take in this one-hour bootcamp. You’ll learn all the latest tools, tips and tricks for making Google and Yahoo love you.

Panelists:  Howie Jacobson, Consultant/Author, “Google Ad Words for Dummies”, Bill Barnes, EVP, Business Development, Enquiro and Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

Tweetup Monday 5/18

May 28-9:  Private Company Training Engagement, San Francisco (Contact TopRank for our on-site training services)

    * Social Media Monitoring and Brand Positioning
    * Search Engine Optimization Skills for Corporate Marketing & Public Relations
    * Social Media Roadmap: Strategies and Tactics for Large Organizations

Presenters: Susan Misukanis, President, Jolina Pettice, Senior Account Manger, Lee Odden, CEO (All from TopRank Online Marketing)

Tweetup Friday 5/29, location TBD

June 2: ClickZ Online Marketing Summit, The Depot in Minneapolis (event info)

3:30 pm: Twitter and Advanced Blog Strategies
The Social Media Road Map:  Many companies are jumping off the cliff of Social Media, while others fear directly engaging customers.  Learn how to strategically align your marketing objectives with long-term social media strategies that work.

4:40 pm: Big Brands, Big Plans Panel
This is the highlight of the day… join a  round-table panel comprised of  the world’s leading brands and practitioners and get the inside scoop on how leading brands are driving success through social media, SEO, websites, and testing, and how you can apply these principles to your own initiatives.

Panelists: Jeanniey Mullen, CMO Zinio, Founder of Email Experience Council, Kevin G. Espinosa, eBusiness Platform Manager, Caterpillar Inc., Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing, Keith Dieruf, Manager, Online Marketing, Ameriprise Financial, Matt McGowan, Vice President of Marketing and Publisher, ClickZ

Tweetup – meetup 6/2

June 4-5:  Social Media Smarts, DMA Seminar Facility, NYC (event inf0)

9:00am – 5:00pm Introduction to the Intersection of SEO and the Social Web Through Strategy, Tools and Tactics
Intensive, 2 day workshop will help companies better understand the social web and how social media and SEO can help increase brand awareness, improve customer relationships and compliment both PR and marketing efforts at growing business.

Tweetup June 4, location TBD

June 10: PRNews Webinar (event info)

1:30pm (EST):  Boosting Your Bottom Line with Online News & Other Cost-Effective PR Tactics

From savvy email marketing campaigns to press releases that attract media attention, there are simple, cost-effective strategies that will help you increase revenue. This webinar promises insight from a mix of expert practitioners in a wide range of areas including:

    * How to generate buzz and word of mouth around your small business
    * Integrating PR efforts with marketing and advertising to increase sales
    * Driving traffic to your website through search engines
    * Building a strong community around your brand
    * PR’s role in uncovering customers’ needs for new products/services
    * Getting buzz and coverage among bloggers and citizen journalists
    * Best/worst tactics for holding media or customer events for your business
    * How to effectively leverage Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook & MySpace
    * Blogs and Video sites: what you need to know
    * Pitch your stories to bloggers and to the Twitter community
    * Writing social media press releases that work
    * Conducting keyword research and finding the keyword sweet spot
    * Optimizing PR content online, posting it and building reciprocal links
    * Linking techniques: from blogs to social networking pages
    * Identifying the most popular search terms for your campaigns
    * SEM tools, resources and SEM for-hire checklists
    * Email marketing Do’s and Don’ts

Panelists: Idill Cakim Vice President, Golin Harris, Sally Falkow Principal, ExpansionPlus & Senior Fellow Society for New Communications Research, Greg Jarboe President, SEO-PR, Lee Odden CEO, TopRank Online Marketing, Sophie Shiatis
Vice President Ecommerce, PRWeb, Moderator: Courtney Barnes Editor, PR News

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There are some important SEO factors that are influenced by the way a site is built, such as information architecture (IA), wireframes, design, and development practices. This isn’t an exhaustive list; rather, it focuses some key tried-and-true practices. Consider the following:

There are some important SEO factors that are influenced by the way a site is built, such as information architecture (IA), wireframes, design, and development practices. This isn’t an exhaustive list; rather, it focuses some key tried-and-true practices. Consider the following:

    * Use keywords in the URL. This can be accomplished by ensuring your file-naming conventions make good use of your keywords.
    * Include targeted content on a page. Ideally, each page should contain two to three paragraphs of descriptive, keyword-rich body text.
    * Place keywords closer to the beginning of the file code. CSS (define) can be used to visually position the text wherever you want it, while making it appear higher up in the code for search engines.
    * Use header tags instead of <div> tags or images. If a page heading or title contains a keyword, it should ideally be text. If possible, use the important keyword in an <h1> tag, a secondary keyword in the <h2> tag, and so on.
    * Limit HTML file size. Keep a lid on the number and size of images and unnecessary code.
    * Add alt text for images. Be descriptive. This is another opportunity to tell search engines what the page is all about. All images should have alt tags, including logos, headings, and so on.
    * Use internal text links instead of image links. Search engines use the content contained within a link to determine what that page being linked to is all about. It needs to be text so they can read it.
    * Deploy search-friendly DHTML. Avoid JavaScript DHTML (define), if possible. Use CSS for cover effects. However, if your site has a menu built this way, be sure to include a secondary text-based navigation.
    * Avoid frames-based Web design. Frames and inline frames (iframes) generally make it difficult for search engines to crawl Web sites.
    * Ensure correct application of the robots.txt file. This enables you to restrict or allow access to your site by search engines. Employ it carefully and properly.
    * Follow proper site redirect architecture. Avoid 302 (temporary) redirects and employ 301(permanent) redirects to ensure the search engines index your content appropriately.
    * Avoid hidden text and other potentially deceptive practices. Any tactics that are considered black hat SEO will probably get you penalized. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday.
    * Steer clear of splash pages. Most splash pages are very graphic-heavy and text-light. They offer little value to users or search engines.
    * Avoid query strings in URLs where possible. I strongly recommend keywords be placed in the URL instead of query strings. URL aliasing can be used for ugly URLs.
    * Create clean, valid code. Search engines appear to prefer code that is lighter, cleaner, simpler, more semantically defined, and in line with W3C standards. CSS can help you achieve this.
    * Use tables appropriately. Tables distort the flow of the HTML code and may push more important elements like the body copy further down in the code than is desirable. A CSS layout enables you to influence where in the code elements appear.
    * Avoid duplicate content. You should never have the same content on multiple domains or within the same site. If you have various versions of your URL, choose one main one and redirect all the others to that.

source: http://www.clickz.com/

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There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.

There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.

Here is an example: Let’s assume you make a change to your website content. Maybe after a few days you notice that your Google ranking for a certain keyword has altered. Now, it would be natural for you to assume that your content change had led to change in ranking. However, it may not be true. Your ranking could have changed due to several reasons, and may have absolutely nothing to do with the changes made to the content.

Here are 10 of the most common organic-SEO myths:

Organic SEO Myth 1: Multiple Website Domains for Multiple Products- More and more, people are being told to create multiple domains for the different areas of their business to create more recognition amongst search engines. WRONG! This is a bad practice for multiple reasons. First of all, it can be expensive, very time-consuming to maintain, and totally unnecessary. Second, search engines can pick up on the attempt to trick them and decrease your rankings on all pages. Also, all incoming links to all these sites are spread very thin. The best option would be to put all the time, money, effort, and link-building into one site and reap the benefits of having a stream-lined, collaborative site.

Organic SEO Myth 2: In order to get better ranking, you absolutely need a Google Sitemap. It’s partially correct. However, if you have built your site properly (ensured its crawler-friendly) you don’t require a Google Sitemap. That being said, having one won’t hurt you and you can even use other Webmaster Central tools offered by Google, but this doesn’t guarantee higher ranking.

Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website rankings. Only update your website content it is necessary and not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that haven’t been updated in years!

Organic SEO Myth 4: PPC (pay per click) ads can help or hurt rankings. What amuses me most is that several people believe that participating in Google AdWords campaigns will hurt their organic SEO ranking, while many other believe that PPC will spike the traffic and up the ranking. All I can say is that neither of this is true!

Organic SEO Myth 5: Not following guidelines on Google will ban your website. Google’s guidelines are common sense but not mandatory. It’s advisable to read them, however just don’t do any thing purely for search engines and you’ll be fine.

Organic SEO Myth 6: Buying links can lead to banning of your website. It is partially true again. Google doesn’t like to count paid links as votes for a website page. Mostly Google is unable to find out if the links are paid for, but even if it does, it won’t count the links. Google won’t ban your website in any case. A quick update, Google has made it easier to report paid links in sites that are unrelated to your site. Thought the reasoning is yet unclear and best practice should tell you don’t buy links in unrelated site to your theme.

Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google positioning without H1 but they certainly don’t hurt so use H tags correctly.

Organic SEO Myth 8: The more reciprocal links to other sites you have, the higher your Google page rank goes.

Explanation: Outbound links to related and unrelated sites are factored into page rank. Reciprocated links count higher than unreciprocated links. The more quality inbound links to your site, the higher the PR, but nobody knows exactly how Google factors their PR and their algorithm is constantly adjusted. A gazillion links to and from unrelated sites could drop your PR and if your site is found linking to obvious FFA or link farms, your site could be penalized as being ‘guilty by association’.

Organic SEO Myth 9: Search engines cannot index pages with Flash and using Flash in your page will lower it’s ranking.

Explanation: This is a big myth. Search engines cannot index a Flash movie itself, but, if you specify Flash text (in the HTML) used in the movie, the text in the movie along with the rest of the page HTML will be indexed. Flash does nothing to keep the page from being properly indexed, nor does it keep your page from being crawled. Search engines don’t like pages that re-direct, including Flash pages that do it automatically. It’s the auto-redirect, not the Flash file that keeps a splash page from being ranked..

Organic SEO Myth 10: Money Spent on SEO is A Waste- Are you serious? Many corporations and small businesses alike have a hard time appropriating funds for search engine optimization strategy. It is justified in the minds of business owners and senior marketing professionals that money spent on traditional media like direct mail, print ads, and television commercials drive in mostly untargeted, general traffic to your site. Search engines drive people that are already looking for your products. How can that be an unimportant practice?

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It’s called SEO—search engine optimization—and it’s pretty much all anyone working with Web sites ever talks about nowadays. You may think it consists of ways to trick the search engines, Google in particular, into giving you higher than usual page rankings. But in fact, it centers around the idea that Google sucks so much that companies think they need to use SEO to get the results they deserve.

By reverse-engineering the way Google operates, SEO experts can see how the process works. From a user’s perspective, once you learn how Google does what it does, it’s a miracle that you ever get the right results. And from my experience, the right results in many circumstances are nearly impossible to obtain—and may never be obtainable in the future.

Let’s look at some of the problems that have developed over the years.

Inability to identify a home site. All the search engines have this habit, but often it is laughable. You’d think that if I were looking for Art Jenkins, and Art Jenkins had a Web site named Artjenkins.com, search engines would list that first, right? Most often this page is never listed anywhere.

Too much commerce, not enough information. There seems to be an underlying belief, especially at Google, that the only reason you go online is to buy something. People merely looking for information are a nuisance. This is made apparent anytime you look for information about a popular product. All you find are sites trying to sell you the product. Hey, here’s a challenge: Ask Google to find you a site that honestly compares cell-phone plans and tells you which is best. Try it! All you get are thousands of sites with fake comparisons promoting something they are selling.

What’s particularly bad about this is that the few honest sites trying to present information without SEO and all the trickery needed to get attention are put out of business; nobody ever finds those sites. The site you are pointed to should be the best site, not a mediocre popular site. This is the biggest flaw with page ranking.

Parked sites. Have you ever gone to look for something and found what seems like the perfect site near the top of the Google results? You click on it only to find one of those fake “parked” sites, where people park domain names, pack them with links to other sites, and hope for random clicks that pay them 10 cents each. How does page ranking, if it works, ever manage to give these bogus sites a high number?

Unrepeatable search results. Ever run a search a week later and get completely different results? In the end, you have to use the search history and hope you can find it. Can things change so drastically day-to-day that the search results vary to an extreme month-to-month? This is compounded by the weird results you get when you are logged in to Google. These are somehow customized for you? In what way?

Google sign-in changes a query’s results to an extreme with no discernible benefit. Often two people are on a call trying to discuss something and both will try finding something online. The conversation often goes like this: “Here it is, I found it. Type in the search term ‘ABCD Fix’ and it’s the fourth result listed.” “I don’t see it. The fourth one down is a pill company.” “You typed in ABCD Fix, right?” “Yeah.” This goes on for a while until you realize that one of the two people is logged into Google.

The solution to this entire mess, which is slowly worsening, is to “wikify” search results somehow without overdoing it. Yahoo! had a good idea when its search engine was actually a directory with segments “owned” by communities of experts. These people could isolate the best of breed, something Google has never managed to do. The basis for Google page-ranking is to equate popularity with quality, and once you look at the information developed by SEO experts, you learn that this strategy barely works.

We have to suffer until something better comes along, but there is at least one crucial fix that could be easily implemented: user flagging. Parked sites, for instance, could be flagged the way you flag spam on a message board or a miscategorized post on craigslist. The risk here is that creeps trying to shut down a specific site could swamp Google with false flags, so maintaining integrity would be difficult. People with their own agendas have already infiltrated and controlled aspects of craigslist and Wikipedia, unfortunately. On Wikipedia, for example, a group pushing the global-warming agenda prevents almost any post with contrary data or opinions, no matter how minor the point.

One suggestion floating around involves the semantic Web, which anticipates even more SEO tricks—and requires a certain level of honesty that can never be maintained. I suggest rethinking the basic organization of the Web itself, using the Google News concept. In other words, compartmentalize the Web to an extreme. Tagging might help. But you should be able just to search through a subsegment and check a box that eliminates merchants with faux-informational sites.

And speaking of check boxes, over the years there have been numerous attempts at creating an advanced search mechanism utilizing check boxes and a question-and-response AI network. You’d think that idea would have gotten further than it has. Hopefully, someone will conceptualize something new that works better than what we have today. The situation is just deteriorating too fast.

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