Take, for instance, the latest web comic that Dorkly posted. It deals with Skyrim and playing tag, two great games that apparently go great together. It looks like a great deal of fun, just make sure the person you’re tagging doesn’t have any soul gems in their inventory, or at least hope they are over-encumbered and won’t be able to run after you:

By encouraging consumers to share product offers across social networking platforms, word is spread about the product and the information base gets richer and richer. As the connections grow, the products and services gain more exposure. Not only does it provide information about who ideal consumers are demographically, it gives them a comprehensive list of who exactly to target.

Pat O’Brien, Chief Marketing Officer at SourceLink comments on the powerful new offering:

“TAG is an exciting new offering in our multichannel suite of services, because it offers a means to integrate digital, print, transactional and social channels,”

“Many companies are unsure how to properly leverage social networking sites as part of their marketing plans, and this product provides a measurable solution for businesses looking to capitalize on emerging trends.”

This is the hottest trend right now. Organizations should really capitalize on the social networks that are available right at their fingertips. Word of mouth can be one of the most important forms of promotion and this service takes that concept to the next level. It truly is the exploitation of social influence to gain recognition and ideally sales.

Brent Tartar, Vice President of Sales at SourceLink also comments on the new edition of TAG:

“We are thrilled to offer our customers the opportunity to truly harness social media and the sharing aspects associated with it,”

“By combining traditional marketing channels with emerging social media platforms, TAG maximizes marketing reach and opens up avenues to reach new customers and inform them about product offerings.”

I think we are going to see a lot more advertising technology employing this kind of strategy. As social networking grows in popularity, more advertisers will want to take advantage of those relationships.

Users can download the Microsoft Tag app on their smartphone, take a photo of the Tag and be directed to a website, view a text message or linked to a phone number.

Microsoft says since its beta launch more than 1 billion Tags have been printed globally and in April more than 20 million magazine with Tags were in the hands of U.S. consumers.

"We’ve already seen a lot of enthusiasm for Tag among marketers, developers and consumers as well as a diverse range of creative scenarios using Tag in industries as varied as publishing, advertising, retail, real estate, transit, automotive, consumer packaged goods, tourism and entertainment," Microsoft said in a blog post.

"This past week, for instance. Amsterdam became the second world city with a Tag-led tour, with Tags on monuments, museums, restaurants, bars, and other landmarks. The Mall of America, in Minnesota, has announced plans to use Tag to help enhance customer engagement and give retailers an interactive tool to promote their products."

Microsoft said it will be introducing analytics, reporting and real-time location services for Tag clients in the future.
 

How To Look Your Best In Search Results

Because nobody makes snap judgments like a searcher.

During a recent trip to Google’s Kirkland, Washington office, Matt Cutts and colleagues spent an hour creating impromptu videos on various search-related topics. The first to be posted involves "the anatomy of a search snippet," and how much control a webmaster has over what information is displayed in search results.

The answer to how much control is: quite a bit, actually. This article will explore Cutts’s explanation of the snippet, and ways to make the best of your search presence. Much of managing your appearance in the search results involves telling Google what to index and what not to index.

Homepage Title

The first thing you see in your search result is the title, and this is the first thing that Cutts also addresses. In honor of being in the Pacific Northwest, he used Starbucks’ search result as an example, which labels its homepage as "Starbucks Homepage." This is your first impression.

Cutts questioned whether the word "homepage" was a good choice (Google took the title directly from the page) as few would search for that word. Starbucks being so recognizable, it hardly matters, but for smaller business it’s a good idea to optimize wherever you can. "Starbucks Coffee" might have been a better SEO choice.

A usability expert might argue, though, that straightforward is best, and giving the searcher what he or she expects to see will have a direct impact on whether a link is clicked. 

The Snippet

The snippet is where the webmaster has the most control of what is displayed about his or her site. Google often pulls the snippet text directly from the meta description tags, and Cutts recommends experimenting with the text to see what yields the best results for individual sites.

Longer snippets, as we’ve noted before, help searchers with informational queries, and may also be of benefit for SEO reasons. Shorter ones work better for navigational queries.

Google may also pull snippets from other places as well, depending on the query or situation. If no description is available, Cutts says Google may grab information from the Open Directory Project or other directories. Or, to find the context of a query, Google may look to beyond meta description tags to increase relevance.

If there is content you don’t want to appear in the snippet, you can add the "nosnippet tag" to your HTML, which looks like this: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Cache Page

The cache page acts as a backup if a website is for some reason unavailable. It will show an archived version of your site, show when it was last crawled by the Googlebot, and serves as a sort of content freshness indicator. Regularly updating content is a good way to influence what appears there, but also useful is the ability to tell Google what not to archive. To prevent the Googlebot from creating a cached version of a page, use the NOARCHIVE tag, which looks like this <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

Site Links

Cutts was quick to assure viewers that site links were algorithmic and not payment based. In the Starbucks example, these would be headed "Store Locator" and "Career Center." So there may not be a lot of control over Google chooses as an important related page to increase searcher relevancy, other than using a NOINDEX tag for certain pages so the Googlebot knows what to skip, and making sure the language is clear as to what the pages you do want indexed are for.

If a page is seasonal or promotional only and you want Google to stop crawling that page after a certain time period, you can use the "unavailable_after" tag. Effective use of the tags mentioned also help control what appears on the "more results" page.

In my SEO blog reading yesterday, I first found a post by Danny Sullivan about meta tags. Then just this morning I read a post by Matt McGee also about meta tags and he makes the same point:

The Keywords meta tag is useless, except for misspellings.

If your page has a product, service, or keyword that can be misspelled, instead of intentionally misspelling the word in your text, use your keywords meta tag. It won’t get you page 1 placement necessarily, but it definitely makes a difference.

If I had say in the Googlerithm, I would tie the spelling functions with the search functions, and if a page ranked well for a certain phrase, but the user misspelled the phrase, I would certainly give more relevance to a page that had the misspelling on it (albeit in a keyword meta tag).

With that said, I would certainly not focus much time at all working on the keywords meta tag, but while you’re under the hood making changes to your site, it wouldn’t hurt.

Comments

Tag:

Based on threads in both Webmaster World and Digital Point Yahoo! Might have ceased using the No Yahoo Directory Tag.

Reports range from

“I’ve tried switching "meta=SLURP" with "meta=robots" but it still doesn’t work… ”

to

“Just this last few days Yahoo is ignoring this tag on my site:

And has reverted back to showing my Yahoo Directory title and description.

This happened just after my annual renewal in the directory (may be a coincidence)”

More information on Webmaster World and Digital Point.

Comments

"There are 93.8 million blogs worldwide," says SEO-PR president and co-founder Greg Jarboe. "Getting excited about getting a blog is like getting excited when the phone book arrives."

"Yeah, but, it’s your name in print," says Navin Johnson.

That’s not a reason to not have one though. A blog is still an effective way to get noticed and to gain an audience. "Things will starting happening to you now," reminds Navin.

But only if you do it right. "If you don’t have a blog, go ahead and start one," says Jarboe, "but the whole industry has moved on. It’s now about performance; it’s now about results."

Okay, so how do you get those results? Well, there’s probably not a finite set of things, but there are some good suggestions. Jarboe suggests staying away from turf already claimed. "Look for emerging terms. Find terms that are upcoming or growing in importancethat don’t have five years of entrenched bloggers competing for them."

But if you have to enter ground already well-traveled, it’s a good idea to get in good with those that know the road. Join their conversations, get their attention, earn a link.

Jarboe joins Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, LLC in providing some expert advice on optimizing a blog, and we’ve organized that advice into a neat top ten list. (The plugins recommended are all for WordPress.)

10 Ways To Optimize Your Blog

1.    Tag clouds and tag pages; check out Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for creating these. Spencer says he doubled traffic to one his blogs by adding it.

2.    Add a "Related Posts" feature. Spencer recommends the Contextual Related Posts plugin for WordPress.

3.    Top Ten posts feature to display most popular posts

4.    Add "next" and "previous" post buttons

5.    Build inbound links

6.    Title tags – use SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress to assign unique title tags to individual posts.

7.    Claim your blog at Technorati and use Technorati tags

8.    Use "sticky" posts that always appear at the top of the page as a way to add a keywords-rich introduction to category pages. Adhesive plugin works for this.

9.    Use the Buzzlogic tool to find out which bloggers are most influential in conversations – refer to them and try to get them to link to you.

10.    Get into other bloggers’ blog rolls (trackbacks and comments won’t help in link gain.

Bonus: Rick Klau, who works in strategic partner development for Google, also has some solid advice for optimizing RSS feeds via Feedburner and even Facebook. He also reiterates the importance of providing full text feeds rather than partial feeds. Check out 10 Tips For Optimizing RSS.

He has followed that up with a full-fledged post on the official Google blog about the new tag. The unavailable_after META tag informs the Googlebot when a page should be removed from Google’s search results:

This information is treated as a removal request: it will take about a day after the removal date passes for the page to disappear from the search results. We currently only support unavailable_after for Google web search results.

After the removal, the page stops showing in Google search results but it is not removed from our system.

Fully removing something from Google still requires the URL removal tool, found as one of Google’s Webmaster Central tools.

Google also extended some control over assets beyond web pages to webmasters. Those who publish PDF, audio, video, or other file types can direct the crawler on how Google should manage access to them from its index.

“We’ve extended our support for META tags so they can now be associated with any file,” said Crow. “Simply add any supported META tag to a new X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header used to serve the file.”

Supported META tags include options like noarchive, nosnippet, noindex, and unavailable_after. Google sees these as offering enough flexibility to satisfy site publishers; we imagine they have organizations like AFP and Copiepresse in mind here.

Whalen’s account of the news appeared at High Rankings:

Google is coming out with a new tag called

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/unavailable-after-google-plans-new-meta-tag-2007-07/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/keyword-placement-in-title-tag-case-study-2007-07 http://www.webpronews.com/keyword-placement-in-title-tag-case-study-2007-07#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:51:18 +0000 Joe Whyte http://www.webpronews.com/?p=38994 According to search ranking factors done by SEOmoz, your keyword in your title tag is the upmost importance, but the placement of that keyword in your title tag has been debated. Some believe that placing your branding first and then kewyords in your title tag causes little or no difference when optimizing a page in the SERPS. I am going to finally uncover this once and for all.

]]> According to search ranking factors done by SEOmoz, your keyword in your title tag is the upmost importance, but the placement of that keyword in your title tag has been debated. Some believe that placing your branding first and then kewyords in your title tag causes little or no difference when optimizing a page in the SERPS. I am going to finally uncover this once and for all.

With my experience in title tag optimization I feel that by placing the keyword I truly want to rank for OR the most difficult keyword I am optimizing for on a given page should be the first or close to the begining of the title tag and NOT the end. When I optimized lunarpages for the term “web hosting” I did change the title tag and moved web hosting closer to the front of the title tag and along with many other alterations we where able to get to the home page for “web hosting”.

However because I did much more with the site besides altering the title tag we can not use this as a real life example of the power of keyword placement within your title tag.

Currently I rank 32 in google for SEO consulting. My current title tag reads “Joe Whyte – Seo Consulting – rockyfied”.

Below is a photo of the current rankings within google for the term “seo consulting”.

Adversely I also rank #3 on the first page of google for “Joe Whyte”. See below for image.

I will attempt to change my title tag and Repost my findings. I am curious to know what other people will think about doing this change and the importance of keyword placement within your title tag.

Comments

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