At Search Control we understand the importance of optimizing the appropriate aspects of your website in order to make it rank in Google.  As well as ranking in Google at all, you want your website to rank for the exact keywords that relate to your website because these are the words that your customers will use to find you.  This article discusses a few mistakes that can easily be made during Search Engine Optimization.  Avoiding these mistakes will allow you to take control of your website in the search engine.

Mistake #1

The first mistake involves taking your SEO campaign into your own hands, making changes, and failing to inform your Search Engine Optimizer.  For example, making changes and editing an outdated version of your website and then making it live to the world.   It is a better idea to stick with the new version of the website and not resorting back to the old version.  Making the old version of the website live again will cancel out the hard work done by your Search Engine Optimizer in the new site.

Mistake # 2

A common mistake that can happen to the lesser tech savvy website administrator is disallowing search engines from indexing and crawling your site’s content.  This can happen to those who are trying to stop scraper bots from accessing the website, so to prevent this, they upload a robots.txt file.  When in doubt, consult your SEO campaign manager before making any technical changes to your website that you do not fully understand.  It is important that the search engines can see your website!

Mistake # 3

Along the same lines as the second mistake, make sure that every technical change you make to your site does not bring along unintended consequences, such as losing your good Page Rank.  Be cautious while changing your CMS as to not lose your hard work for the rank.  If you must change your URL, seek the advice from your Search Engine Optimizer.

Mistake # 4

Be sure to continuously check the status of your ranking before making any changes to the site.  If you want to change your URL to include more keywords, for example, check and see how your current URL is ranked for those keywords.  Remember, making changes to your URL is a drastic step which can cause your keyword optimization to be lost.

To read more about optimization mistakes, click here.

The powerful and dominant search engine, Google, has recently unveiled it’s new social network called Google+.    While  businesses and individuals who are concerned in their rank on the search engine have been involved in Google+ since the beginning, others lag behind.  The article below discusses the methods that were used by Google to create a buzz for Google’s new product.

By: Terri Wells

In my field, I’m a late adopter. I only joined Google+ on Wednesday, and I’m still getting my feet under me (please don’t ask me about Hangouts yet). In comparing this social site to Google’s other attempts at social networking, though, I think the search company got it right this time – not just in the way Google+ works, but in the way they’re marketing it.

To be fair, I can’t say that the company took a substantially different approach in marketing Google+ than it’s taken in marketing its other products. And some of the factors I’m thinking of as “marketing” actually pertain more to the nature of the product itself. Even so, I think I can distill some ideas that you might find worth using in your next website marketing campaign.

Let’s start with the product idea itself. From a user’s perspective, it looks as if Google examined what is actually working for people and thought about how to make it better. But they thought very hard about how to make it better. Thus, Google+ looks a lot like Facebook, but functions differently – and better – in some very important ways. It also combines features from other social networks, such as Twitter (you can follow people, for example).

That’s not marketing until you consider the next steps. Google tested the product in-house, and then reached out to early adopters for beta testing. They knew who the early adopters were, because they know who writes about them – and where they stand in Google’s own search results. High-ranking websites carry a certain amount of influence, after all. This is why Search Engine Land has been on Google+ for months.

When you reach out to the bloggers in your field, it’s potentially a double-edged sword. They’ll tell you what you got right, but they’ll also tell you what you got wrong. That’s actually a good thing, especially if they’re willing to get access to your product in exchange for a limited-time non-disclosure agreement. Let them participate in shaping your product, and you know you’ll be serving not just their needs, but the needs of their substantial audience.

Once you do let these early-adopting bloggers start writing about your product, they’re going to generate plenty of buzz within their own audience. This is where Google got something else right, which they’ve done before: rather than immediately opening Google+ to everyone, they gave their early adopters invitations to spread to their friends. Google did that with Gmail, and this immediately created a demand; the very fact that you couldn’t just join the service, but had to receive an invitation, made it special.

This tactic worked with Google Plus, but it wouldn’t have worked as well if there weren’t so many people blogging about it – and blogging positively, almost gushing about the new social site. Indeed, one somewhat meta post from Search Engine Land even talks about how excited everyone is about Google Plus. Who could pass up an invitation to an exclusive club that all of the active members you know about seems to love?

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Website-Marketing-Help/What-Google-Did-Right-in-Marketing-Google-Plus/

While blogging may appear simple and straightforward to some, there are a few steps one should take to ensure that the blog has a high PageRank within search engines. The purpose of this article is to serve as a tool that one can use to help increase the search engine optimization (SEO) of a blog. Keywords are one of the most important elements to increasing ones search engine optimization. Knowing which keywords are applicable to the business is half the battle.

The first step in the optimization of your blog is to create an appropriate and relevant title for the blog. Page titles directly affect how a blog ranks within a search engine, making it extremely important to use your keywords as much as possible within a title. Likewise, the sooner those keywords appear within the title, the better. For example, according to Rich Brooks, “you’ll get better results from titling your post Super Bowl Commercial Reviews: The Best and Worst Ads, as opposed to What I Thought of Last Night’s Super Bowl Ads.”

Just because your title contains keywords does not mean you are done optimizing; repeating those keywords and key phrases throughout the rest of the blog is equally important. Just as with the title, having keywords appear towards the beginning of the blog rather than at the end maximizes your search results.

The next step in optimization is to add links to other web pages within your blog. However, simply linking to random pages on your blog will not raise your PageRank. The more appropriate and relatable the links are to the topic of your blog, the better. When you link a web page on your blog, be sure and use your keywords and key phrases in the link rather than plainly saying, “click here”. Remember, the more keywords and key phrases used, the better.

WordTracker is a helpful tool that allows the user to type in a keyword or phrase and see what questions people are asking in search engines and how many times those questions are being asked. This tool allows you to choose the perfect keywords for your blog. In addition to WordTracker, there are also different SEO plug-in packages for bloggers, such as Flyte Blog and WordPress. While some are free and some are paid for, these packages make it easier for the user to add, improve on, and edit the content within their blog.

By following these steps and taking advantage of all of the tools that are available, your blog will begin to see an increase in long-term credibility and SEO success.

To learn more about search engine optimization, go to http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ultimate-bloggers-guide-to-search-engine-optimization/

It’s a fair bet that your boss, dates and anyone you give your business card to will type your name into a search engine. If something negative appears in the results, your online reputation can quickly damage your offline reputation — and affect your life.

Of the almost 80% of U.S. hiring managers who had searched for candidates online, 70% of them said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found in his or her search results, according to a 2009 study commissioned by Microsoft.

While you might not be able to remove damaging content from the Internet, there’s a good chance that you can minimize its impact using simple SEO techniques. And even if your search results are squeaky clean, the same techniques can help you control how you’re perceived online.

Here’s how to get started.

Step 1: See Where You Stand

Before you can manage your online reputation, you have to assess it. Type your names in search engines. Set up search alerts for your name (Google recently made this easier to do from the Google dashboard through a new “Me on the Web” tool).

If you find something unflattering, ask yourself:

• Did I post it? If, for instance, photos from your Flickr account that you’d rather keep private are showing up in search results for your name, you can simply delete the photos or adjust your privacy settings.

  After you’ve removed the offensive content, you can use Google’s URL removal tool to stop it from appearing as a cached copy or snippet in search results. If you do nothing, the content will still eventually drop from Google’s index — it will just take a bit longer to disappear.

• Is it personal information that could be used in a crime? If someone posts your social security number, bank account number, credit card number or an image of your handwritten signature, Google will make efforts to remove it from search results. It will also contact the site’s hosting company to request that the page be taken down.
• Is it posted on a high-traffic news site? Competing for search results with a popular news site is difficult. But Patrick Ambron, the cofounder of a personal online reputation management service called Brand-Yourself, says that all hope is not lost. “Google usually only likes to rank one result per domain name per page,” he says. “So if you could get another result on the same domain name like Huffington Post that was better optimized for your name, you could theoretically knock the bad article off.” One way to do this is to create a profile on that news site using your full name. Use as many links as possible, and link to the profile from all of your other web properties.

If you can’t answer “yes” to either of these questions, your best bet for reducing the visibility of negative content is to compete for top search results using positive content.

Step 2: Post Positive Content

“If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either,” reads Google’s guide to keeping personal information out of Google. “Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business.”

In other words, if you want to make negative webpages appear lower in search, you’ll need to create content of relevance to push the negative links down. Google suggests responding to negative reviews of your business, for instance.

Profiles on social networks are powerful tools for this purpose, as results from large sites like Facebook and Twitter often carry more SEO power than a single post on something like a personal blog.

Step 3. Create an Identity Hub

One secret to pushing your positive online presence further up in search results is to make a hub that links to all of your content. Ambron recommends these tips for pushing your hub to the top of search results for your name.

• Claim your domain name. Including the search term (in this case, your name) in the URL of your web page tells search engines what the page is about.
• Mention yourself. You’re trying to tell search spiders, “This page is about me!” A good way to do that is to use your name a lot. Use your name in tabs and headers.
• Link to your content. “[Google] considers each link to your site a vote for the site,” Ambron says. “Google has gotten pretty smart, so where those links come from is very important. The more reputable links are better votes. A vote from CNN is better than some site you made that you just linked to yourself.”

  Remember all of those social media profiles that you created in step two? They’re attached to reputable sources like Facebook and Twitter, which makes their “votes” count as much more reputable than a page you just created.

  Sign up for as many of them as possible (use one of these sites to see what is available), and then link them all to your hub.

• Post often. Search engines like fresh content. One easy way to create it is to post your social media feeds to your blog.

Step 4. Consider Automating the Process

There are several services that will help you with your quest for a pristine online reputation for a small fee. Brand-Yourself, for instance, keeps track of your reputation on a dashboard and helps you improve it by helping you raise existing positive content or helping you create new positive content. Vizibility allows users to pre-select the information they want displayed in “search results” from a special button or URL that can be added to online profiles, websites, resumes, email signatures and business cards.

http://mashable.com/2011/06/27/manage-online-reputation-seo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29