Tag Archives: SEO

Happy Halloween from Zenergy Works!

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A slightly early, but very Happy Halloween from the Zenergy Works team! We received some pumpkins in the mail from Google last week for being Google Partners, so naturally teammate Tim Wilson took matters into his own hands to create a Google-worthy pumpkin. It was quite the process.

Tim Pumpkin Zenergy

With all the creepiness and spooky stories circulating at this time of year, this seems like a good time to reflect on some of the scariest internet marketing stories we know.

The Cryptic Case of Keyword Stuffing!

One night, a young entrepreneur hears about a little something called “search engine optimization.” After a ten-minute research session, he decides he has everything he needs. He starts writing, and popping in keywords, and underlining, and bolding, and hyperlinking like mad. In a feverish frenzy, mad with his newfound power, he begins typing, “My business is the best business to provide you with business in Business Town” over, and over, and over again. It’s only then that he realizes he can’t stop. He types, and types, and types until he collapses, stone dead. But his hands don’t stop, can’t stop.

The Web Design of Terror!

There’s a place that no one goes. It’s whispered in secret among the locals, traded like Tweets amongst schoolchildren. They call it The Worst Website In The World. It’s rumored that if you type it into your URL bar, you’ll be exposed to a clashing color scheme so horrific that GeoCities would run away screaming in agony. The navigation will trick you, luring you into a maze of dead links and missing pages. The calendar hasn’t been updated since 2006. If you gaze upon it, the image of low-resolution, vacant smiles will be burned into your mind’s eye forever. If you say its name three times in front of a computer monitor, the poorly-drawn mascot will crawl out and kick your dog. Beware!

Social Media Meltdown in Hades!

The rain came down hard, beating against the windows of a business owner who was feeling very irritated with a certain Yelp review. Moments before, the review had sunk its teeth into his thumb, infecting him with a rage that grew larger every second. “You’re wrong!” he screamed at the screen, banging at his keyboard with a ferocity never before seen in his store. Browsing customers shrank away, fleeing for the exits. Once it started, the fire burning inside consumed him. He took his fury to Facebook, then Twitter, then the blogs clamoring for interviews, telling the world that he wouldn’t stand for a smear campaign. His eyes glowed red as coals. “You’ll never ruin me! NEVER!” he cried as the floor opened up to swallow him into darkness.

Yikes. That got pretty scary. Have a pumpkin to make up for it. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Google Pumpkin

Tips for Creating Great Content Writing

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There are many different ways to increase the effectiveness of your content writing and encourage more interaction. Blogs, social media, and websites all require different approaches, since their used for different goals. Your first step toward creating interesting content and increasing the likelihood of interaction from your audience starts by figuring out what you want.

Are you interested in leads or brand recognition? Receiving reviews or making sales? Climbing search engine rankings or creating a loyal customer base? All of the above? Then make sure you select the correct approach. Technically, if you’re creative, any of the following could be used for any of the aforementioned goals. However, here’s how they’re most frequently used.

writing good content

Website content is the static content available on your website, both on your homepage and your internal pages. It is often used to create brief marketing copy to give users a bite-sized synopsis of what your business does, aids in local SEO services, and give calls to action.

Blog content can be purely informative or highly creative. If you want to build a loyal audience, you’ll want to approach with innovation and write about topics that draw responses. If your goal is to further your website’s relevance to search engines, then creating interesting content isn’t going to be as important as creating informative, relevant content. If you can combine the two, you’re golden.

Social media content has become incredibly multi-faceted. It can be used to increase your company’s weight on search engines, but it can also be used to build brand recognition, practice customer support, or weigh audience sentiment. It’s shorter, punchier, and designed for fast and easy consumption. Brevity is key.

Approaching your content takes slightly more skill than throwing some keywords into a paragraph and throwing it up on your website. It’s always best to work with a professional copywriter, particularly one who’s up to date on the most recent SEO requirements for the major search engines. You have to be willing to really sit down and decide what, exactly, you want your content to get people to do, and then put a plan in place to make it happen. Magic works in storybooks, but not in marketing.

A few more tips to live by:

If you want readers, you have to be readable. This sounds like complete non-advice, we know, but extrapolate a little. Research other blogs and social media in your industry to see what they’re doing that’s working… or not. If you’re not getting bites, change course. When people respond, take note of how and why.

Succinct delivery defeats verbose posturing… within reason. This tip comes with a caveat: sometimes it’s okay to be a little long-winded. Google’s getting smarter, which means it can figure out when you’re just repeating the same content with different keywords. Organic content – content that reads naturally rather than structured – is gaining prominence. For marketing purposes, make your point quickly and cleverly. For relevance and gaining authority, learn to write good, organic content. If you want to be read, either write short or write quality.

Ask for what you want. Don’t be afraid to directly ask people to share your content. Make sharing easy by adding share buttons. Tell people what you want them to do. Don’t be pushy, but do be direct.

Stephanie Wargin is the Social Media Strategist at Zenergy Works, a web design and SEO company located in Santa Rosa, California. Her friends like to brush her hair into her eyes whenever she talks about Facebook.

What’s New For July 12, 2013 – Facebook Graph Search, Mobile Design & SEO

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Facebook Opens Up Graph Search for US English Users

In an announcement today, Facebook has announced that it is opening up its graph search for all US English users. Facebook launched Graph Search in January of this year to a limited audience. Since this beta test, the following improvements have been made:

  • Graph Search is better today at displaying the most relevant results first
  • Graph Search shows suggested potential searches and search results more quickly
  • There are more ways of asking questions today

Results in Graph Search are limited to content shared with the person doing the searching.

Different Approaches To Mobile Design Defined:

Everyone knows that mobile design has become, or needs to become, an integral part of every online marketing campaign. The question is: which vehicle to use? All of the tools listed below will function alongside Google. The different approaches to mobile design compatibility are outlined below:

Implementation URLs Content
Responsive design One URL for both desktop and mobile The page serves basically the same content to all users but detects the device and screen size and builds the layout accordingly. As the screen size gets smaller, the page may show fewer images, less text, or a simplified navigation.
Dynamic Serving One URL for both desktop and mobile The page serves different content compatible with different devices.
Mobile URLs Different URLs for desktop and mobile The mobile and desktop experience are completely different.

Please consult a Professional SEO firm on how to best optimize for each of these applications. Incorrect handling of the URLs and canonical issues for each application can cause a deterioration of rankings.

Social Media Optimization

New Study:  50% of Non-Successful SEO Companies Do Not Employ Social Media

Companies that have successful SEO campaigns, according to a new study from Ascend2 integrate social media into SEO strategies and tactics more extensively than companies that struggle with SEO.

The study polled approximately 600 marketing professionals around the world and asked the group to rate their own companies’ SEO success.The biggest difference between the “very successful” and “not successful” companies is their use of social media as part of the SEO strategy. 50 percent of the “not succeeding at SEO” companies did not integrate Social Media into their online campaigns, while 38 percent of those “very successful” with SEO are doing extensive integration of social media.

Additionally, 48 percent of all respondents said “creating original content” is the most effective SEO tactic, and only 19 percent said “external link building” is the most effective.

Bottom Line: Social Media, Mobile Integration and Great Content are the chief ingredients of successful online marketing campaigns and SEO. No matter how you slice the news, these topics seem to dominate the headlines.  The checklist for successful online marketing is clear.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, A Santa Rosa, California based SEO, Website Development and Online Marketing Firm.

Matt Cutts Of Google Talks About Upcoming Changes

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Matt Cutts of Google has just done something that he rarely, if ever, has done:  give a preview of what is coming in terms of changes that will affect SEO in the near future, defined as the summer of 2013. Of course, this list was accompanied by the usual disclaimers that all of these initiatives are subject to change as the future unfolds.

Google Penguin 2.0

A partial list of the proposed changes is below:

  1. Google Penguin 2.0 – Expect it to become more and more difficult to employ black hat link building techniques and gain rankings on Google. Stick to real links that a human being would use. Google Penguin 2.0 will be significant according to Cutts.
  2. Advertorial Spam Links Devalued – It will become difficult to get page weight credit for a link from a website that is paid for as opposed to place for the benefit of the website’s visitors.
  3. More Sophisticated Link Analysis – A stricter definition of spammed links and more sophisticated tools to use in detecting and discounting the value of these links.
  4. Improvements For Sites With Malware Hacks -More sophisticated tools to detect malware in a site and a full set of tools within webmaster tools to test, identify and eliminate malware from websites.  This is especially noteworthy for sites built in Word Press.
  5. Authority Sites Boosted In Algorithm – Efforts will be made to identify true authorities in different areas of expertise and bonus these authorities in the search engine rankings.
  6. Panda To Be Relaxed – Some sites that have been held back due to Google Panda (lack of unique, compelling and original content) will be given somewhat of a break under the new guidelines.

Bottom Line: For most websites, SEO will likely continue to be a challenge, but not a challenge that will have significant negative impacts on site rankings.  Webmasters will have to continue to strive to build sites that offer a great user experience through original and compelling content that is valuable to the visitors of the site.  It is a lot of work, but you will sleep much better at night.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, A Santa Rosa, California based SEO, Website Design and Development, and Online Marketing Firm.

Bing Study: The Value of Ranking First

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Any SEO provider and webmaster knows that the value of ranking first in search results is extremely valuable, but a new study by Bing is putting some hard numbers on it: Over 50 percent of Bing users click the first result, and more than 75 percent click there if the first result includes Bing’s deep links.

In a blog post, Dr. Ronny Kohavi of Bing’s Research & Development team, shares the data about the habits of Bing users when they view search results.

Bing Users

Bing says that only about 4-6 percent click the third search result. Only about 2-3 percent of Bing users click on the fourth result down to less than one percent click-through rate on the eighth search result.

The trend tends to change when a user hits the browser back button, prompting Bing to display more results on the first page. About 9 months ago, Bing started to display 8 results on first page on an initial search, and then once the browser back button is used, the number increases to 12 results. Once the user accesses more search results, lower positions are clicked on at a rate of 5 to 8 times higher than the first results page.

Bottom Line: Bing Continues to innovate and create search results that are useful to users in an effort to compete with Google. SEOs cannot afford to ignore Yahoo/Bing, which still comprise 25-30% of today’s search volume. Clients who are new to SEO may find the wins in rankings earlier on Bing/Yahoo, which tends to be a little more forgiving on technical on page issues like duplicate page titles.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, A Santa Rosa, California based Local SEO Services, Website Development and Online Marketing Firm.

3 Things That You Can Do To Improve Your Website’s Local Placement

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I often get calls from local businesses wondering what they have to do to restore their presence in local search and improve their local rankings.  The first things we review are the Google Algorithm Changes, and their impact on the search rankings for the website.   If we find these are the culprit, you most likely will require professional assistance to address these.   If your website issues are not that complex, here are 3 things that you can do to improve your local rankings, if you are willing to devote considerable time and energy to your website and search engine marketing. 

 1. NAP.   NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number.   So far, so good.   If your business has dropped off of page one in the local listings, but can still be found when a deeper search is done on Google for your business under the “Places” search, it is most likely because the exact name, address and phone number of your business that appears on your website does not match other sources of information on line like Yellow Page Directories, Social Sites, etc.  This is especially of concern if your business has moved. To find your listings, simply do a search for your name bracketed by quote symbols (“ “) in Google.   Review all of the results carefully, and you will have to correct any old or improper names.   Please remember that the match must be exact, including punctuation (watch commas), abbreviations (suite no. vs. ste. vs. #), and abbreviations of the business name (ZW vs. Zenergy Works vs. Zenergy).  This can be an incredibly time consuming process, but a professional SEO firm can be of help.

 2. Duplicate Content.  Google Panda has mandated that the content for your site is best ranked when it is original content that provides value for the web user.  If you know that you have copied website content from another site, you must rewrite that content as soon as possible so that it is unique to your business. This is another way you can improve your local rankings. You can use services like Copy Scape to review the content, or you can copy and paste your content into Google to see if the search returns an exact match.  If your content must be rewritten, please take pains to make sure that it reflects your business culture and is valuable to the web visitor.  The final concern is that it is at least 35% different than any existing content.

3. Blogging.   Creating and using a Word Press Blog at least once a week will help your local rankings and also ensure that fresh and valuable content is constantly available on your website.  Be sure to include keywords in the blog post that apply to your business, and link to parts of your website that relate to topics covered in the blog post.   Make sure that your blog posts appear on your Facebook Fan Page and also on Twitter, and use your client email list to announce that your new blog posts will be found on these social media outlets.  Don’t be afraid to not exclusively talk about business on your blog, but let your personality shine through for subjects that may not be totally business, but have a humorous take on your industry.

Bottom Line:  This is a very simple approach to these issues, but there is extensive information on all of the above subjects in various SEO blogs, tweets, and there is even a do-it-yourself video guide for Google + Local Listings.   All of the methods listed above have nuances and techniques that are outside the scope of this blog post.   For a consultation on any of the subjects above, please contact Zenergy Works and we will do our best to steer you in the right direction.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, A Santa Rosa, California SEO, Website Design and Online Marketing Firm.

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