SEO, or search engine optimization should be the most important component of your internet marketing strategy. While email marketing and internet advertising (Pay-per-click) can usually be handled in-house, SEO can be technical and is best outsourced to a SEO services company. Unsolicited emails and PPC Ads are ‘interruption marketing’ : you are interrupting your prospects attention with an unsolicited message. Such ads or messages can be annoying and tend to be ignored. In contrast, SEO is ‘permission marketing’ because the consumer is actively seeking information while typing keywords in search engine, and if your website is positioned at the top, it will get attention. Thus SEO has a lasting and profound impact on your business, while email marketing and internet advertising have short term impact.

It follows that selecting the right SEO agency becomes very important. The task can be daunting since prices for SEO services vary widely,  and you will meet vendors who promise top rankings within even a month, and other such claims. SEO can be quite technical and evaluating SEO providers is challenging.

Here are some tips to evaluate and choose the right SEO company.

1. The first step is to review your internet marketing  activities and assess where you stand.  You need to set up objectives or what you would like to be achieved by the SEO consultant.
2. Learn the very basics of SEO before investing in SEO. If you have no clue about SEO, you may work at cross purposes with your SEO provider, or risk being taken for a ride (more on this below)
3. Ask the vendors to share success stories or case studies. If you ask for client list, then look at client sites, you may across poorly optimized sites or sites with basic SEO mistakes. This could be because the client did not implement the on-page SEO recommendations, and so you cannot fault the SEO consultant. This happens more often than you would imagine.
4. Make sure you meet the SEO company people and ask them to evaluate your site and give broad suggestions. It builds trust in the SEO firm’s expertise  and gives you insight into how they solve problems and what the roles and responsibilities of both parties would  be after contract is signed.   You should meet the person who will be working directly on your site’s SEO, and not just the smooth talking sales person or the expert SEO team lead who in turn delegates to a junior.
5. Check that the SEO agency  follows only ‘white hat’ or ethical SEO practices.
6. Get at least three quotes. You will get to know the scope of services, what is covered. It helps to uncover SEO activities that the vendor you prefer may not have included.
7. Do not select based on pricing. If you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys. It is better to pay top dollar and get great results. You will recover your money through sales conversions soon enough.
8. Trust your gut feel.  Sign up with the agency you feel most confident will bring results and feel comfortable interacting with.

Ananya SEO Services was set up in November 2009 by a small group of IT industry senior executives to provide  professional internet marketing services. Within three years it has acquired and successfully delivered results for clients from India, USA and UK.  Staring with just SEO services,  Ananya’s product offerings rapidly expanded to include PPC advertising management, Social Media Marketing and Web development services.

Ananya SEO Services was set up in November 2009 by Anand Rao, an alumnus of Indian Institute of management, Ahmedabad. With more than two decades of experience in leading IT services companies in India, he realized there was a substantial underserved market in the small businesses and non-profits  sector for   affordable search engine optimization services by a company which is transparent and professional. Small organizations, such as NGOs and serviced apartments operators, do not have any experience in SEO or PPC ads. They are often unable to articulate their goals and expectations from a SEO vendor and find selecting a vendor challenging.
Our  mission is to provide affordable search engine marketing services to small businesses and non-profits , who would find services provided by bigger companies beyond their budget.  We have stuck to our principles of providing transparent and ethical services. We have never guaranteed SEO outcomes despite risk of losing clients.
We are honored to work with Alcove Service Apartments and Seruds NGO for the third year running. They have stayed with us through the economic downturn and have contributed to our growth in both revenues and knowledge.

Ananya is celebrating  its third anniversary with a special deal for customers. Clients who sign up and pay online between today and 30 November for SEO or PPC management  services would get 25% discount on SEO Pricing Plans and PPC Management  Plans.

The case discussed in this article illustrates what could happen when a local (region or subsidiary in a country) of a multi-national company (MNC) feels under-served by its parent’s internet marketing campaign when it sees that  local website is ranked poorly in organic search.

A multi-regional website is one that targets users in various regions (generally different countries). Implementing websites for multiple regions (usually countries) presents several challenges from SEO perspective, chief being duplicate content and showing pages from correct version of website to visitor from a region.
The objective is to have one Web site for U.K. visitors, one site for Indian visitors, and another for U.S. visitors. The intention is to have each Web site ranking in one country, that is India site should be ranked for visitors in India. Given this objective, this is not a duplicate content scenario. The search engines should  permit the intended behavior, since the web master is trying to offer a better experience for users through localization of the versions of the Web site.
The real challenge is a technical issue. Search engines use crawlers or spiders  that index pages and rank websit. This process is prone to error.
There are several options to creating multiple versions of your website from a single root domain controlled by parent company for its subsidiaries in various regions.
URL structures
Subdirectories with geographical TLDs
India website being example .com/in/
France site being example .com /fr/,  and so on

The advantages are that is  easy to set up and we  can use Webmaster Tools for geo-targeting.  The case gets complicated if for example the India site targets India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.  It is not possible to geo-target multiple countries for same folder.

Subdomains with gTLDs
e.g. : de.site.com, in.site.com, etc
The advantages  of this approach that it is easy to set up, can use Webmaster Tools geo-targeting, each subdomain can be hosted in the target country,.
Geo-targeting in Webmaster Tools does not have the same impact  that using country level TLD, such as site.co.in gives, particularly if the site is hosted in same country.
A local vendor is retained to do SEO for the local version of website of the subsidiary.  The structure of multi-country website is, in normal practice, to set up one sub-domain or sub-folder for each country.

The challenges of SEO of single website version  of  a multi-regional site

-    Duplication of content. Google will rank generally only single page in search results, quite likely from that of parent site – thus frustrating local SEO. Use of  ‘rel=canonical’  does not help since each local unit/region  wants page from local site/sub-folder/sub-domain as case may be,  to rank high in search results
-    IT division of parent company may not trust the local SEO vendor. Hence access to website to modify content may not be given to local unit.
Single Google Analytics account for whole web site would have been set up. To see reports of pages from folder, filter (Advanced Segments)  has to be setup. Unfortunately at this point, there is no facility to create filter for the new seo reports (queries, landing pages from Google Webmaster account)  within Google Analytics.
To ensure the success of SEO campaign for country website, following things must be ensured :
-    Support of CIO of parent company
-    Congruence or agreement on objectives of SEO by local vendor and the country-unit  and parent company.
-    Support of CEO or CIO of the country-unit
SEO Issues
•    Directory submissions : many directories do not accept sub-domains or sub-folder as url to be listed
•    For B2B or technical products such as software, the same product is being offered in all countries and it is difficult to tailor content, beyond local variations in spelling, etc.

After the success of Search Plus Your World , Google would surely fine-tune its algorithms to  introduce weighted social search signals into Google’s public web search results.

Google organic search was about finding the relevant results for anybody. Google Search Plus Your World is about finding the best results for you.

SEO in 2012 has become all about creating content that motivates people to share via by links or by circles. The conclusion is that you should put effort in optimizing your Google Plus Page, add Google Plus buttons on your web properties, like a Google +1 button to your WordPress blog posts and pages.

SEO for  Google+ Page

Search Plus Your World  makes it more important to create and focus on optimizing your Google Plus Page

Title or name of your Google+ Page :  use a business name, or keywords  in your Google+ Page’s Name section

Meta Description: You should include your keywords in description, and it may help you rank better in Search Plus Your World.

Photos : here you can add 5 main photos that would whenever someone looks at your Google Plus Page and could show up Search Plus Your World results . You can add keywords in photos.

Recommended Links : add  links that are relevant to business/brand/company, such as your website, Facebook Page, Blog. Use keywords as anchor text.

Introduction :
Describe your services/products. Here is a chance to put in your main keywords subtly.

Link Building

Build links to your Google+ Page with your keyword in your anchor text . Write guest posts with your Google Plus Page link in your author bio with a rel=”publisher” or rel=”author”

Update Frequently
Frequent updates in your Google+ Page (once or twice a week) will indicate that page is active. Fresh content is now part of Google’s algorithm, and so an active Google+ Page will help put it up in Search Plus Your World.

Promote your Google+ Page

Focus on building the number of people who add your Google Plus Page in their  circles.

Google has indicated that gaining +1s can help improve your ranking for those who have directly +1ed your content, as well as for those they are connected to. Should it appear for those who aren’t connected it will show  an overall +1 count for your page. This will help in click throughs.

Google’s search results have been influenced by social signals to a limited extent  for years . To give a brief history, Google launched Social Search in October 2009 :

Google builds a social circle of your friends using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed.  Chat buddies and contacts in your groups from Gmail,  some websites from your Google Reader  subscriptions are included in your social circle.

At that time Social Search was segregated from regular listings.  Google would provide  relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlighted it for you at the bottom of your search results.

This further evolved in February 2011. Google’s social search results were blended into regular results in Febrary 2011 and grew to include not just content created by those you know but also content shared by them through a many social networks.

Notes were  added for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. Content shared on Twitter, Google Reader, Quora, and other sites you and your contacts have listed in your Google Profiles are used by Google. A new Google Account setting allows you to add social networking accounts to your Google Profile while keeping the connections private.

Google Plus Buttons were launched  in June 2011. Larry Page has announced that 90 million users have signed up to Google Plus since launch : compelling evidence that Google Plus buttons are growing in importance.

What is Search Plus Your World

On 1/10/2012, Google announced roll out of Search Plus Your World,

Three new features have been introduced in social search:

1.    Personal Results, : Google will show  results personalized for yourself, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you,
2.     Profiles in Search,  auto-complete and results, will suggest profiles of people you’re close to or might be interested in following;
3.    People and Pages,  this will suggest  people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and you can choose follow them with just a few clicks.

Search plus Your World is available to people who are signed in and searching on https://www.google.com in English. E.g., it has not been rolled out to google.co.in

With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. The view personalizes the listings you get based on both your own behavior and social connections. Now it includes content that’s been shared with you through the Google+ social network :   public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos  and private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

You’ll be alerted that personalized results are appearing when you see one or both of the indicators :

•    a message that  says that there are “x personal results and xxx other results”
•    new toggle that allows you to switch between personalized and unpersonalized results.

Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Faceboo, Twitter, Flick, or other social networks  content might be shared to private audience.

You can opt-out permanently through the Search Settings area on Google. You can also opt-out on a per-search basis using the aforementioned toggle. Click on the globe symbol, and you’ll see unpersonalized results.

Your Search Plus Your World results are hidden behind https:// and no keywords will be linked to your search in any analytics programs.

Read next post   on SEO for Google Search Plus Your World

Google completed its Caffeine web indexing system in 2010, which allows crawling and indexing  the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Drawing upon the  Caffeine infrastructure, Google has made what it calls a significant improvement to search ranking algorithm.

Google  announced  on 3 November 2011  a new search algorithm change which rewards ‘fresh content’.  Google claims to have rolled out a major  enhancement to its ranking algorithm  designed to yield more up-to-date relevant results for the following types of searches dependent on freshness :
1.    Breaking news or trending topics : when you search for current events like ‘confidence vote in Greece parliament’ you want to see up to the minute news, not a commentary which is days old. With this algorithm change, you should see more high-quality and freshest pages.

2.    recurring events : Events like Olympics, elections to parliament and conferences take place on recurring basis. When you search for ‘election results’, you are really looking for latest update to the elections that just took place, not the results of elections held 10 years ago.

3.    When most up to date content is relevant : information related to products or technology, places, politicians, and the like change frequently. When you search for ‘best compact digital cameras’, obviously you are looking for the latest cameras.
Google maintains that the search algorithm update will impact about 35% of searches.

Caffeine indexing infrastructure
Google’s crawling and indexing systems worked as batch processes earlier .  Googlebot  would crawl a set of pages, then process those pages (extracting content from them, associating data about them, such as anchor text and external links, determining what those pages were about), and finally add them to the index. While this system was continuous, all the documents in the batch had to wait until the whole batch was processed to be pushed live.
Now with Caffeine new web indexing system having gone live, when Google crawls a page, it processes that page through the entire indexing pipeline and pushes it live nearly instantly. This change has resulted in a 50 percent fresher index than before.

The downside
The change does not necessarily mean that search will be improved by 35% or any such extent. Search has always been subject to spam and manipulation, most notoriously by content farms. Sites which scrape content sometimes rank higher than the original page.  Google’s panda update was one of the major attempts by the search major to battle spam.
Webmasters will try to tweak pages a little bit and post it again, hoping to be recognized as ‘fresh’.
Google has not revealed  how “freshness” is being determined.  But it is certain that quantum of change and time would not be the only factors.  The topicality and quality of content will also be factored in.
Latest tweets will still be missing from the updated search. Google’s agreement with Twitter to carry its results expired on July 2, 2011.  Since then  Google does not have access to the special feed from Twitter; without this firehose of data it cannot index tweets fast enough to bring up latest tweets.

How to leverage the Google update rather than get penalized

If you do not keep your website updated regularly, your site will be negatively impacted. To take advantage of the Google update rather than become its victim, webmasters need to keep their pages updated regularly with some of the following  :
-    press releases or company announcements
-    changes in management
-    corporate events like sales meets and user group conferences
-    product enhancements, new releases
-    news from industry
-
SEO techniques like using titles, keywords, headings to advantage and ‘snippets’ will doubtless remain as relevant as before.

On December 15, 2010 Bing had announced major updates to Bing search, centered around richer Facebook integration and visually organized experience.Prior to this, the ranking of your website on SERP in Bing was not significantly impacted by your presence on social media sites – Facebook likes, tweets, posts on Facebook Pages.

Bing has enhanced the Facebook effect with its announcement on 16 May 2011. When you search a keyword, Bing finds out what your Facebook friends are interested in, finds stories they have liked by clicking “Like” buttons on web pages, and then shows those pages in the top results – even if those links would not have appeared in SERP.

Bing took a swipe at Google by commenting “Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people” in its announcement Bing is bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the “Friend Effect” to search .

There are three components of the new, social powered Bing experience:

• Friends you trust
• Collective Intelligence
• Facilitating Conversations

With this new tweak, it is not only votes by your Facebook friends, but the collective wisdom of online crowds that will influence search results. Bing now shows well-liked content, including trending topics, articles and Facebook fan pages, from sites across the web, to help you dig in and quickly find exactly what you’re looking for. Bing will show what major brands and companies are saying in recent Facebook posts

With Enabling Conversations, Bing helps people to quickly identify those people in their network who may be able to help them in making a decision or providing advice.

Bing will help in your buying decisions:

Bing Travel Wish List: You can compare trips with Facebook friends, get their advice, suggest new travel destinations, and learn more about a city on Bing Travel.

Friends Who Live Here: Bing will show you which of your Facebook friends live or have lived in the city you intend to visit, so that you can go to them for travel tips.

Flight Deals: Bing will send to your Facebook feed great deals on flights, for cities you’ve liked on Bing Travel.
Shared Shopping Lists: You can build a shopping list and share, compare and discuss it with your friends on Facebook.

Read full article at can-your-business-afford-to-ignore-facebook

You’d better not lose an opportunity – go ahead and add the XFBML version of Facebook Like button to your website and plugins for ‘Facebook like’ button on company blog

On 23 March, Yahoo announced launch of Search Direct. As you begin to type search term in search box, completed search terms will appear in a drop down box, and you will see  the most relevant or top search results in the expanded search box. Yahoo calls it ‘rich answers’.  This is obviously a direct hit against Google Instant.

Yahoo claims it is fast, and the rich content is stored in its own servers, not MS Bing database, though after Search Alliance was rolled out with yahoo results coming from Bing, the search index is drawn from Bing.

Search Direct  is still in beta and covers USA, and content  coverage includes top trending searches, movies, TV, sports teams and players, weather, local, travel, stocks, and shopping categories. You need to go to http://search.yahoo.com/ to experience Search Direct.

So which is better?  To test it out, we typed ‘fuku’ in Search Direct  on 24 March 2011 at 7:45 PM IST.

When you position cursor at search box, immediately, top searches are shown. It was baffling to find ‘2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami -…’  as top news search results.

When ‘fuku’ was typed out, the screen below shows Yahoo’s ‘direct answers’. The top news was dated 23 March 4:40 AM.

Next we tried it on Google. You can see the instant results in this screen, on selecting option ‘fukushima’

google instant for fukushima

Interestingly, Google news results, lower down in page, show real time results. This news item had timeline 24 minutes ago.

Pictured: The robots called in to help prevent nuclear meltdown at Fukushima plant
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:26 PM on 24th March 2011

In yahoo, when you hit back button, you get the initial screen, and you have to start search all over again

Take note that you need to go to http://search.yahoo.com/. When you type ‘fuku’ in http://yahoo.com/  ‘fukushima’ is seventh option, and you do not see direct or instant answers in the page.

For fun, google did show instant results  with ananya seo company website and other links even as we finished typing  ‘anaya seo’, but yahoo direct did not!!

Yahoo says ‘Search Direct predicts search results as fast as a person types, character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience that goes beyond a list of blue links’. This is clearly aimed at Google Instant.  But the claim is not borne out by our experience.  Search Direct does show more number of search options as you type, and if you point your mouse cursor at an option, the instant results are updated in the expanded search box.

But in Google too, if you press the down arrow key on to an option, the instant results are updated. What is more, the instant results cover the entire page, not a smaller expanded search doox, as in Yahoo.

In the press event, Yahoo suggested it owned patents on Instant Search. It said Search Direct is the next generation of search.

Our analysis shows that Yahoo’s claims as hyping the product, which is closer to a vapor ware now.

Bing made a splash with integration of search results with Facebook ‘liked by’ friends links. Bing holds currently only 12% to 15% of search market, so as a business you might dismiss social networking only for nerds and restless young.

All along Google too had its stake in social search with a social circle link below search results since 2009. Now Google has made the social graph more important to organic search with its announcement on February 17, 2011 that links liked by your friends will be bumped up the search results. Your online circle is built by Google from the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed, Gmail contacts (this will include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups).

Social search results will now be blended with other organic results based on their relevance.

Annotation below the result will specify the friend or connection who either shared the link and mode of sharing, like tweet or created content in a blog or publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website or posted a video on YouTube or a photo on Picasa.  Annotation will be  visible only to you, and only when you’re signed into Google account.  There is a new option to that  enables you to choose whether or not to show your connected accounts publicly on your Google profile.

Google images went social last year. When you search on Images, you will  seeing pictures from people in your social circle, which have been  published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr.

Google has a deal with Twitter for full access. It has access to Flickr and Quora content as well. What takes away the fizz is that your social data in Facebook is not integrated. After all Facebook is the most important social networking platform. Maybe some in near future, Google and Facebook may cozy up.

Clearly, as a business owner, you cannot be unsocial. If you have not done so, dress up and start making your presence felt in all social media platforms. Add buttons on your website to share on Twitter and other platforms. Make it easy for people to share your content from website and company blog.

There have two developments in Google search which have bearing for SEO in 2011 :  first is improved spam detection and the second is PageRank changes.

Battling Content Spam

On 21 January 2011, Google announced a redesigned document-level classifier to detect web spam. This will detect pages with scraped content using bots or software, or manual spam content, such as repeated keywords words which occur in junk, automated, self-promoting blog comments, or sites created for link exchange. This will affect primarily sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

Google also claims to target “content farms,” which generate content for SEO based on keywords. These employ low-paid content creators, who scrape content from high ranking sites. However, certain sites generate high revenues from Adsense for Google, and experts doubt if Google will black list sites like eHow, LiveStrong.com.  AOL, with Seed.com and Yahoo, with its Associated Content , are also in the content farm business.

Content scraping, and pingback spam are some of the biggest threats a genuine site faces in 2011. There are tools for pingback spamming and content scraping. Solutions are: check pingbacks before approving them; you can report any scraped content to Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Auto blog pingback spam is now so bad that many blogs are refusing to accept any pingbacks at all.  This is due to many unethical sites that create blogs using packages of WordPress plugins that copy content from other blogs or article publishing sites, and send pingbacks to many blogs to try to get backlinks and traffic.

PageRank Update

Under the patent filing granted in May 2010, how much value might a link on a page pass along in a link-based ranking system like PageRank and search results ranking will be based upon a large number of factors, such as where the link is located on a page, whether the link is a different color or font style than other links, how many words are used in the anchor text for the link, whether the link text used is commercial or not, what the topic of the page is that the link appears upon and the topic of the page pointed to by the link, and many others.

Previously, each link on a page passed the same amount of authority to the target page. Now, every link is weighted according to how likely a “reasonable surfer” would be to click on that link.

We at Ananya SEO Company have always followed organic natural link building. These developments make it clear that SEO methods like Forum posting and blog commenting, Bulk link exchange, link exchange with link farms with small text links in page footers, stuffed sidebars, link exchange pages and automatic directory submission will not work any more.

PageRank that you see in tool bar is only an indication and one of 200 factors considered by Google. Google probably no longer uses it and advises webmasters not to worry about it. Yet PageRank has a mythical status and revered by webmasters. The latest PageRank update occurred around 20 Jan 2011.