If your company routinely creates press releases announcing new services and news-worthy developments, you obviously understand the value and purpose of these PR vehicles. However, given that more and more individuals are now using major search engines to gather product information and retrieve consumer news, it is very important to understand the value of ensuring that your press releases are “optimized” as well.
Microsoft’s Live Search (formally known as MSN) has reinstated the link command after disabling it back in March. This is the command that allows users to view inbound links for a site indexed by Live Search. The new command is slightly different with a plus (+) sign added to the beginning. For example:
In the past couple days, our SEO Department here at EngineWorks has observed an apparent major update being made to the Natural search ranking algorithms at Yahoo!. We have seen a significant improvement in positioning within the Yahoo! index for several of our clients.
Search Engine Roundtable is reporting a possible second Google PageRank update for October via several threads from Digital Point. According to our internal client tracking, there has not been any change in the PageRank reported by the Google toolbar. Could this update only effect sites which are purchasing or selling paid links? Has anyone else seen a change in there PageRank?
Update: Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land just posted a comprehensive list of sites that have been affected by Google’s latest update.
Top Search Queries by Percentage
Inside Google Webmaster Tools, you can now access “Statistics >> Top Search Queries” to view the percentage of traffic delivered to your site by search query and by date range. The date range can be selected monthly for the past six (6) months, or weekly for the past three (3) weeks. This ability to customize the date range is very helpful in gaining insight into the relative strength of your referring keywords for your Web site.
First off, let me apologize for the lack of recent posts to our EngineWorks blog. We have been extremely busy with the addition of several new team members (Rachel Nordquist, Scott Fish, Ryan Craven, Chloe Collins and Kimberly Nickelson), as well as launching robust campaigns for numerous new world-class clients. That said; let’s turn our attention to the topic of improving results through Google’s new universal search offering.
A well-defined domain name can provide tremendous advantages for an online business, including the added benefit of boosting performance in the search engines. Simple, easily-recognized domains convey professionalism and trust to search engine users. Just as important, however, is the fact that businesses can extend their reach in the search engines through a generic domain name, or through a domain that uses a country specific extension (see Country Code Top Level Domains below) to provide localized results to potential customer.
Yesterday, Kevin Delaney at the Wall Street Journal, published an article titled “How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing“. This is a tremendously valuable article for all online businesses engaged in a re-design (or considering a re-design) of their Web site.
Keyword research is arguably the most important component of search engine optimization, and yet, also one of the most time-consuming, and many times, the most frustrating. As the foundation for all search engine marketing efforts, in-depth research into a site’s most relevant keywords ensures that your optimization enhancements achieve prominently positioned Natural search listings for search phases that get results.
