Mission E-Commerce

Let me share some lies, damned lies, and statistics about search engine optimization and social media marketing. Over the past year I have read what seems like an increasing number of articles proclaiming that “Social Media Marketing is where it’s at, baby!” or something to that effect. Maybe that’s just the perception I have.

Certainly there seems no end of pundits, critics, and conference keynoters who declare SEO to be dead. We get a little premature declaration from these self-appointed coroners of Munchkinland every 1-2 months. I saw an interesting comment about PubCon keynoters (who tend to be people of whom I know nothing) always declaring SEO to be dead within six months and never being invited back to speak at PubCon. I know Brett Tabke has a reputation for being hard on people but it seems to me that after 11 years of PubCon history someone in the prognosticator field would have figured out the correlation.

But I digress. SEO doesn’t seem to be dead in the wake of Google’s Panda Revolution — rather, it seems to be challenged to clean up its act (which, unfortunately, may never happen while search engines can be deceived). Search engine optimization is a rainbow of opinions, methods, practices, ethics, and so forth. You’re “bad” if you’re near the red end of the spectrum and “good” if you’re near the blue end (it’s a metaphor, so please don’t give in to the compulsion to defend or insert your favorite colors).

If we want to compare the health of SEO to the health of social media marketing, how do we do that? I suppose one good metric might be the amount of money companies spend on one versus the other — better yet, what about projected budgets for 2012? Alas! I am too lazy to search for that information.

Another good metric might be the number of job openings in both fields, but as social media marketing is still following in SEO’s footsteps in terms of developing into a legitimate profession, the numbers might be skewed. Perhaps a better metric might be to count the number of Corporate Vice Presidents who specialize in Search Strategies versus the number of CVPs who specialize in Social Media (or Social Outreach, or whatever they want to call it). I think you would have to look at the Vice President level because too many “Director-level” jobs are anything but true director-type positions. A lot of companies toss “Manager” and “Director” titles around like candy. They seem to be holding the line with Vice Presidencies (but maybe that’s just my blind perception).

Being too lazy to do the research, I have cast my thought around for another set of metrics. I thought, “What about the queries reported by Google Trends for the past few years?” That might hold some promise. So after running a few tests I settled on the following test criteria:

1. I will only look at US search queries
2. I will include search service names (assuming they are navigational queries)
3. I will include social media service names (assuming they are navigational queries)
4. I will compare SEO and SMM and Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing

These are simple tests and the pretty pictures are pretty simple results. Hence, my argument in support of using these metrics will be simple: If you don’t like the test, do your own.

Read the full article here

By Nicole Beckett

Publishing great SEO content is harder than you might think. After all, you need content that wows readers, teaches them something new, and convinces them that you’re a bona-fide expert – all while letting the search engines know exactly what keywords you’re trying to rank for.

Anytime you’re dealing with SEO content, you’re walking a fine line. That next article or blog posting you publish has the potential to make you stand out, make you blend in with the rest of your competitors, or make you look downright bad.

Making matters even more difficult? There are a ton of SEO content myths floating around out there. On the surface, many of them look legitimate – so it can be tough to separate the wisdom from the rubbish. In fact, you may not even know that you’re operating your entire content writing philosophy under a myth!

Are you falling victim to any of these 5 popular SEO content myths?

1. The Best SEO Content is 1,000 Words. (or 500 words, or 250 words)

This is a common sentence uttered by people who just don’t know a whole lot. You may be inclined to think that longer is better, or that shorter content will leave people yearning for more – but the truth is, there is no “magical” SEO content length.

Instead, the best length for your SEO article, blog posting, or sales copy depends on your topic. Sure, it may be easy to create 1,500 compelling, well-researched words about getting over a divorce – but imagine what it would be like to read 1,500 words about heartburn medication or pipe welding. Trust me, your readers won’t want to do it, either!

Great SEO content writing leaves readers feeling like they’ve learned something new, and it instills enough trust in you that readers want to see what else you have to offer. Sometimes, you can do that in 400 words. Other times, it takes 1,200 words to do it.

2. If Your SEO Articles Get Re-Published on a Bunch of Different Sites, It’s Duplicate Content

This might be the biggest SEO content myth out there! If one of your SEO articles gets picked up (either from your site, an article directory, or from a site you published a guest post on), it’s called “syndication,” not “duplicate content.” That’s because “duplicate content” refers to have the same content on multiple pages of your own site. Syndication, on the other hand, is a great way to build links and get exposure.

Anytime you publish SEO content, the goal is to get it syndicated. That way, it winds up in front of the eyeballs of people who are going to do business with you.

Read the full article here

By Matthew Briggs

Having your business rank in local search results can get complicated, especially if the local review sites don’t have your correct business address. Correlating the right business address online is super important in order to rank in local search results. Logging into each local review site individually and correcting your business address manually may seem like you’re David facing off Goliath–but there is an easier way.

A more efficient way to correct the information for your business is to correct the errors before the information is sent to the hundreds of local review sites. You will have to correct your data in the source with the data providers. Currently, there are three major data providers including Localeze,Infogroup, and Universal Business Listing.

Why Change Information With The Data Provider?

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing get their local business information from two locations; they store local business information in their own index and receive it from data providers.

Once your business information is submitted to Localeze and Universal Business Listing, your information will start to trickle down to smaller local review sites like Yelp, SuperPages, and DexKnows. These smaller local review sites pull their data from the larger data providers. If you correlate your business information at the source of the problem (major data providers) then you’ll save yourself time, effort, energy, and money. That’s the best way to take on the giant.

We’ve seen awesome results for our local SEO clients. Simply go to Localeze and Universal Business Listing, enter your information, pay a small fee, and you’ll have all of your local business information correlated across the Internet. Now that’s an easy way to do small business SEO.

Good Luck!

Read more here

Friends of Mission E-Commerce at the Dental Offices of Dr. Mark K. McAlister are celebrating Halloween by dressing up in costumes and reminding parents and children to be kind to their teeth while collecting candy this weekend.

This Halloween, Dr. Mark McAlister DDS and his orthodontics team are bringing the spooky festivities into the office by wearing colorful outfits for their patients. Dr. Mark takes pride in keeping the atmosphere young, fun, and lively for all of the children and young adults who visit his office. By doing so, he is reminding kids and adults alike to take care of their investment in their dental work by keeping their teeth clean over this sugar-filled holiday.

After Halloween, many kids tend to find themselves consuming endless piles of candy in a short period of time. Candy, especially in large amounts, can be detrimental to a mouth filled with braces. Dr.Mac wants his patients to enjoy the festivities and he understands that people will ultimately indulge in their trick-or-treating candy. While it may be impossible for some to avoid candy altogether, it is important to know the risks that can result from binging on candy.
Orthodontist, Mark K. McAlister’s tip is short and simple: do not over-eat on Halloween candy!
Most candy is almost entirely sugar and, therefore, can lead to rotting teeth and cavities. Some of the most dangerous candies are those that are extremely hard or sticky. The hard candies are known to break braces or, even worse, to break teeth. On the other hand, sticky candies can bend, break, and destroy the wires holding the braces together.

While the most health-concerned people say to stay away from any and all candy, Dr. Mark McAlister understands that Halloween is a special day that only comes once a year. Dr. Mac’s office strongly suggests that parents of children with braces (and without) be aware of the types of candy, as well as the quantities each child has. Halloween is a fun and exciting holiday and Mark knows that braces do not have to ruin the excitement.

Mark McAlister DDS

Mark McAlister is a Phoenix, AZ based orthodontist who specializes in braces, early orthodontic treatment, and invisalign. His patients are mainly anyone 8 years old to adults. Dr.Mark’s practice is child friendly and equipped with the most updated technology. They also offer early morning and later afternoon appointments for extra convenience.

More information can be found online at http://phoenixbraces.net/

by Dev Basu

Without links and keywords the internet stands still. So, for our local seo clients we are always digging into keywords and their ideal use.  In a nutshell, keywords and keyword phrases are the driving force behind raising search engine ranking and drawing site traffic. Sounds easy doesn’t it? However, successful SEO marketing encompasses a great deal more than “pick and place” keywords. The following SEO keyword strategy will help to achieve more localized results.

Choosing Relevant Keywords and Keyword Phrases

The first step in an effective SEO strategy is choosing keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your niche. Targeting keywords that deal with health won’t help if you’re selling automotive products.

Also, you don’t want keywords which are too general or broad in their scope. Although “automobiles” may be a high ranking keyword, it won’t do much good for your automotive product business because such a search will result in too vast a selection of sites for customers to draw from. You can localize your keyword list even further by using phrases such as “automotive parts in St. Louis” for example. Choosing keywords and phrases which deal specifically with your product or service and your target area are what you’re after.

In order to create a list of viable keywords, sit down and do some serious thinking about what you would use to search for your specific products or services. Put yourself in your clients’ shoes and determine what questions they might ask and how you might solve their problems. Draw similar advice from family and friends, and visit competitors’ sites and see what keywords they are using.

Utilizing Free Online Tools

Once you have your keyword list, turn to one or more of the free online tools available. Google provides some of the best, but others such as Word Tracker are good as well. There are also various software products which you can purchase to help with choosing keywords. However, it’s advisable to avoid them as the rules and criteria change frequently and these tools can quickly become outdated and provide misleading information.

Since Google is the most popular search engine, we’ll use their keyword tool for this example. Go down your list of keywords and plug each one into the Google keyword tool. A list of keywords will be generated which show both “Local Search Volume” and “Global Search Volume”. Export these lists into a spreadsheet and eliminate all keywords which are not relevant. When you’ve weeded out your list, you can begin the process of determining the best keywords to use. The idea is to keep the keywords which are both relevant and popular yet have a low competition factor.

Determining Keyword Value

A keyword’s competitive factor is achieved by determining its value compared to other sites. To do this, run each keyword through a Google search to bring up its results. For instance, a search for “automotive parts” produces “About 64,700,000 results”.  Even though this is a large number, it refers to all pages on which “automotive products” appears. To reduce this number, we simply need to transform our original keyword into a title using the operator “allintitle: automotive parts”. A new search now reveals 216,000 sites which have that verbiage in the title. Since titles are strong strategic elements in SEO ranking, this number will help determine the keyword’s value.

Add this value to another column on your spreadsheet and continue with this process until you have created a value for all keywords listed. You will then want to keep all keywords which have both a low “allintitle” value and a high “Global Search Volume”.

Although there is much more to an effective SEO strategy, this will give you a strong jump on the competition. By building these keywords and keyword phrases into good content on your site, you will grab a larger portion of those customers looking for your product or service.

Read more: http://www.poweredbysearch.com/best-local-seo-keywords/#ixzz1bvN2fvFt

By Robyn Storms

Privacy and SSL encryption are important to a lot of internet users. Google recognizes this and is always looking for ways to improve online security for its users. A major announcement was published yesterday on the Google Blog, touting enhanced search privacy for signed-in users.

Last year, Google introduced an encrypted search service for those who opted to use it. Now that same service will be the default search experience for users signed-in to their Google Accounts, redirecting them tohttps://www.google.com. According to Evelyn Kao, Product Manager at Google, the change will encrypt search queries and the results page. “As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver,” wrote Kao. For those not signed in or for those who don’t have a Google account the secure site can still be accessed by navigating directly tohttps://www.google.com.

What does this mean for Analytics?

Currently webmasters are able to see when a visitor arrives via Google, complete with the query. Once this change rolls out, that search query will no longer be available. Those visits will still be attributed to organic search, but webmasters will see “not provided” in place of the actual search query.

Search query data will still be available in an aggregated list through Google Webmaster Tools and will show the top 1000 search queries bringing in traffic over the past 30 days.

Several Googlers estimate this change to impact a minor amount of website visits, and Matt Cutts estimates the impact to be as small as a single-digit percentage.

What are your thoughts? Is this a good or bad change for webmasters, business owners, and search marketers? For searchers?

Read more here

by Slingshot SEO

Subdomains! The bane of many SEO-conscious organizations, there is an easy solution right under your nose.

By using subfolders in place of subdomains, you can unite your content under one domain. But What if two sites exist on two different servers? A reverse proxy can make the technical implementation quite simple. With that one change, the URL http://blog.slingshotseo.com/ becomes http://www.slingshotseo.com/blog/. By acting as a content broker, your master server acts as a proxy to the content of your other servers. Multiple CMSs, databases and even platforms can be used, while all appearing to come from the same domain.

Check out this infographic to see how reverse proxy technology can relieve your subdomain woes.

Follow this link to see the infographic

By Lee Dobbins

Anchor text is perhaps one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization but it is also one of the least talked about.

This one element of SEO is important to understand because it can help your page get ranked for a target keyword and also help you evaluate your competition more precisely.

The latter is critical and, in fact, if you don’t take anchor text backlinks into proper consideration when looking at the competition for a keyword you could be missing out on some hidden gems that are easy to rank for.

What Is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the hyperlinked text you see on a webpage. It is the visible words that you can click to take you to another page. Anchor text html code looks like this:

<xmp><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>Your Anchor Text</a></xmp>

On most websites, you typically see this as blue text that is underlined and when you click on it with your mouse, you are taken to the corresponding url.

How Bloggers Use Anchor Text

Bloggers and website owners use anchor text naturally to point to other pages on their website as well as pages on other sites that they find relevant to what they are blogging about. You’ve probably even done this yourself when writing a post where you referenced another post on your site, an affiliate product or even a post on another site.

Usually a blogger will use a phrase that indicates what the page is about in the anchor text, as opposed to a url, so that the sentence reads correctly.

The anchor text in these links helps both the visitor and the search engine spiders figure out what the ‘linked to’ page is about.

How Search Engines Use Anchor Text

Search engines use anchor text to help them figure out what the hyperlinked page is about. So, as you can see, getting anchor text backlinks with relevant phrases in the anchor text is pretty important if you want the search engines to rank you for a particular keyword phrase.

In fact, anchor text is such an important factor in ranking a page that pages can rank for a keyword phrase even when that phrase does not appear in the url on the page!

There are several cases where this has happened, but perhaps the most famous is where the Adobe Reader download page ranked number 1 for the search term ‘click here’ for many years even though those words were nowhere on the page. So many people had linked to that page using the anchor text ‘click here’ that it got to the number 1 spot without any on page SEO for the term.

Search engines place a large importance on external anchor text (links coming in from other sites) and some importance on internal anchor text (links from within your own site) when ranking a page so it stands to reason that you should make getting anchor text backlinks with your target keyword phrases a priority.

One important thing to note is that it is widely thought that if two links on the same page target the same url, that only the first link is counted by Google so you want to be sure that you use your desired anchor text in that first link.

How Anchor Text is Important When Judging Competition for a Keyword

If you think about how important anchor text is to the search engines when determining ranking for a keyword, then it’s easy to see why it is a critical component of analyzing the competition for a particular keyword phrase.

Google even provides you with a search operator to do this – the allinanchor operator. You can use it by typing the following into the Google search bar:

Allinanchor:”your keyword phrase”

This will return the pages which have anchor text pointing to it that contain the quoted keyword phrase.

I hope you can see how powerful this is – first of all, Google must think it is an important element of a page because it provides the allinanchor operator. Just the existence of the operator would seem to indicate that it uses the anchor text when deciding what a page is about and ranking it.

Secondly, using this operator will show you which pages are optimizing for your chosen keyword phrase!

It makes sense that only the pages that have anchor text backlinks with your phrase are the ones optimizing for it so you can forget about searching for your phrase in quotes or any of that nonsense.

Not only that but, you can take a look at the actual backlinks for each of your competitors and see how many of them have that anchor text and what the strength of those links are to make a more educated guess as to how difficult they will be to beat out for that top spot.

Anchor Text “Best Practices” For Your Website

Now that you know how important anchor text is to your rankings, I’m sure you will want to pay more attention to it in your SEO efforts but you don’t want to go hog wild and create tons of anchor text backlinks all with the same keyword phrase or you might find that your efforts don’t yield the results you want.

Here are some things to consider:

1. Vary Your Anchor Text – We all know that Google prefers it when people link to you naturally and when that is the case, they don’t all use the same anchor text. So, when you are linking to your site from your articles or web2.0 properties you want to make sure you don’t always use the same phrase as well. Using your target phrase in about 50% – 60% of the links is probably a good idea.

Read more here

By: Josh Lowensohn

Among Amazon’s announcements today is that the retail and cloud services giant is stepping into the browser market with a new Web browser that ships in its upcoming Android-based tablet.

That new browser is called Silk, and it’s the latest effort to make Web browsing faster, especially on portable devices where the hardware is typically slower than what a user might have on a desktop or notebook computer. It can also learn how you browse the Web, and extend battery life by putting some of the heavy lifting in the cloud, Amazon says.

The company is putting the weight of its massive cloud services infrastructure behind the browser to make up for potential hardware shortcomings. While the Kindle Fire tablet ships with a dual-core processor that’s capable of running games and other applications, the company says that users have come to expect a certain amount of speed on the desktop that isn’t always there on mobile devices.

Amazon’s solution is what it calls a “split-browser,” a method that makes use of local processing for some things, while tapping into its Elastic Compute Cloud to process and serve up content faster than users might get it directly from the device.

That approach is similar to that of Olso, Norway-based Opera, which in 2005 debuted its Opera Mini browser. Like Amazon, that too offered heavy lifting for some pages on the company’s servers, while promising to cut down on mobile data spending by shrinking large pages.

Amazon says its process for determining what the local hardware does versus its own servers is entirely automatic, and done behind the scenes, so users don’t have to manage any special settings or even know what the software is doing. The technology also takes into account things like how good your connectivity is, and how pages are coded to figure out how to put the device’s processor to work versus its own, something the company says can result in better battery life.

Adding to that, Amazon says the software is actually able to learn user habits using the same technology it employs on its retail site, then grabbing pages it thinks people might visit before they’re clicked.

“As Silk serves up millions of page views every day, it learns more about the individual sites it renders and where users go next,” Amazon’s Silk page reads. “By observing the aggregate traffic patterns on various web sites, it refines its heuristics, allowing for accurate predictions of the next page request.”

That’s an interesting parallel to efforts by Google. In June of this year, the search giant took the wraps off of Instant Pages, a feature that served up prerendered versions of Web pages from its search results. The feature went live in Google’s Chrome browser just last month, and like Amazon’s effort, brings the promise of faster browsing, based in part, on user habits.

One big thing to note is that the software will only be available on the Fire, the company’s $199 tablet that arrives in November. It’s unclear whether it will seep into other platforms after that. Amazon has a habit of extending its software to other platforms, yet Silk represents one of the big differentiators from competitors, and something the company can position as a reason to buy its device over another.

Moments after Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told senators “we get it” in regard to regulatory scrutiny, the search giant’s rivals refuted the point.

“Google doesn’t get it,” said Thomas O. Barnett, a lawyer for Expedia, which fought Google’s acquisition of flight data provider ITA Software. “Google won’t even admit reality.”

Barnett said the company is expanding its market power, growing in mobile phones and mobile search, in particular. And it’s using that power to direct users to its services, rather than penalizing rivals who are direct competitors.

Some of the more direct criticism came from Nextag Chief Executive Jeff Katz. He testified that Google’s results for product searches favor its own sites, not competitors such as Nextag.

“Google doesn’t play fair,” Katz said. “Google rigs its results.”

That gives consumers reasons to not use Nextag, since most start their searches with Google.

“They are quietly, deftly, and assuredly moving us aside,” Katz said.

Similarly, Yelp Chief Executive and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman criticized Google for directing search queries to its properties. And he said it’s motivated by the bottom line.

“They prefer to send consumers to the most profitable sites on the Web: their own,” Stoppelman said.

Earlier this year, Stoppelman engaged in a public tussle with Google over scraping reviews from Yelp’s site to use on its competing service, Google Places. He accused Google of running Yelp’s local business reviews on Google Places without compensation. At the time, Google responded that sites like Yelp benefit from Google’s referral traffic.

Google’s outside laywer, Susan Creighton, testified that Web surfers can switch from Google to a competing service anytime. If Google doesn’t deliver results consumers find useful, it’s “free and instantaneous” for them to look elsewhere.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) asked Stoppelman if he would start a company such as Yelp today, given Google’s current market power and business tactics.

“There’s no way I would start fresh,” Stoppelman said. “I wouldn’t even consider it today.”