It’s well known just how important (and robust) Google’s Quality Score is. It’s made up of multiple factors, including click-through rate, landing page quality, and numerous other relevancy factors, and in turn, it affects keywords’ CPCs, ad rank, and other indirect performance factors. While Click-through rate remains the strongest influencer of quality score, Google recently rolled out updates to its quality score calculation that will make the weight of landing page quality a stronger factor in quality score than it has been in the past.

This update definitely makes sense – the landing page a user arrives on after clicking an ad should be relevant to both the ad itself and the keyword that triggered it, and contain original, relevant content that is transparent and easily navigable. Therefore, it only makes sense that landing page quality should be a stronger indicator of quality score than it was in the past. Once the user clicks, it’s the landing page and overall user experience that needs to drive those conversions for your business.

Don’t Overlook Your Landing Pages

Keeping this update in mind, it’s time to revisit all of those landing pages you have set up in your AdWords account to make sure they’re relevant, transparent, and navigable.

Make sure your ads, keywords, and landing pages contain the same content. The message should be fluid, and the information being relayed in the ad should be relayed on the landing page, which of course, should be related to the keyword itself.
Make sure your visitors know what they’ll get when they click on a link, if they enter information, or if they choose to download something off of your site.
Visitors should be able to learn about your company and your site easily, without having to dig around too much.
Make sure to keep the path to conversion short and quick. Minimize clicks so that visitors can get where they want to go quickly, before dropping off the page.
If you want to keep your costs down as much as possible while holding a strong ad position on the SERP, all of these landing pages factors (and more) are necessary. Simply getting your visitors to your site won’t necessarily do the trick – spend time finding the best page possible on your site. Also, don’t be afraid to test out the creation of new pages for the purpose of maintaining quality landing pages throughout your AdWords campaigns. The effort will be worth it in the end.

While Important, Don’t Expect a Radical Change from the Update

Google is currently rolling out these changes to quality score globally. Initially, they expect variations to take place across campaigns in regard to quality score and ad position, but expect things to stabilize shortly after the changes take effect. While it is extremely important you ensure your landing pages are the best they can be, this update does not mean you should disregard the other factors that go into Google’s quality score. Also, you shouldn’t expect to see catastrophic changes in your ad positioning and quality scores within your account. Landing page quality is one piece of the Quality Score puzzle, and all pieces remain important and essential to your account’s success.

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2011/10/11/googles-quality-score-facelift/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lunametrics-blog+(LunaMetrics+Blog)

SEO’s Fundamental Factors

http://searchengineland.com/seotable

Have you noticed recent changes in your ranking?

Algorithm Changes

Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.”

Not all webmasters have been thrilled with this. “Brace yourselves! Another Mayday disaster coming,” someone commented.

Experimenting

Just as the company frequently changes its algorithm, it also frequently experiments with different features, showing them to small sets of users before either turning them into full-fledged features or throwing them away. The jury’s still out on this one, but a new experiment has been spotted, which alters search results as you type your query.

Think of this like autosuggest taking over the entire SERP. This video demonstrates:

Again, this is only an experiment at this stage, and it may never make its way to the mainstream Google experience, but people are already expressing a great deal of concern about it (particularly with regards to queries that begin with words that could yield undesired NSFW results).

My guess is that Google would have ways around that issue, but it remains to be seen if users/webmaters will have to deal with it. If the feature does come to fruition, this is something SEOs are going to have to consider, as it could have a big impact on the habits of searchers. You may, for example, want to optimize more for the earlier words in a longer key phrase, in addition to the key phrase itself. But, we’ll see.

Should Google change search results as you type?

Google Crawling Sites From Numerous IPs

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to some discussion from SEOs in Webmasterworld, who have found for the first time that Googlebot is now crawling from several different IP addresses at the same time. One webmaster said, “. their fast activity notified me so I took a peek to see who was scraping the site… I’ve never seen Google spider so fast and from so many IP addresses, they were all valid Google ip’s but there was like 10-20 of them running at once.”

Acquisition

The other day, it was officially announced that Like.com has been acquired by Google. Like.com is a shopping search company offering visual search technology and an automated cross-matching system for clothing and other merchandise.

At this point, it’s unclear what Google has planned for this technology, but it could very well affect search results for shopping queries, which means it could affect small business visibility for better or for worse. Shopping search is going to be an area of Google to keep an eye on.

Have you noticed anything else interesting happening with Google search within the last week or so? Are you seeing things that are impacting your rankings? Let us know.

Fayette Industrial, a regional leader in contracted sanitation solutions, had a problem with their web site: it was nowhere to be found.

Their site generally functioned as resource for current clients and as a point-of-contact for referrals. But when it came to lead generation and new client conversion, the site simply wasn’t performing. The reason for this became quickly apparent–run a search for “Production Line Cleaning” or “Food Plant Cleaning,” and Fayette Industrial was buried several pages into the search results.

Potential customers who were specifically looking for Fayette Industrial’s expertise simply couldn’t find them.

Fayette realized they needed a partner with the ability to provide meaningful web visibility, and came to Deluge Studios for help. Deluge immediately went to work optimizing their site from the inside-out, rewriting structural code and content and utilizing best-practices to give Fayette Industrial a higher search rank.

The results were immediate and impressive. Within days, Fayette Industrial’s site soared from the depths of search result invisibility to the first page of results in their targeted queries amongst all major search engines.

Fayette Industrial was impressed–so impressed they decided to utilize Deluge Studios’ primary forte, web design and development, to give their site a face-lift. Deluge went back to work, creating a site that was more usable, more functionally robust, and designed around Fayette Industrial’s strategic business goals.

Immediately following the newly redesigned site’s unveiling, Fayette settled into the top five links on all of its targeted search results. More importantly, the new web site quickly converted two completely new clients for Fayette Industrial, providing an immediate return on investment that single-handedly paid for the redesigned web site and then some.

If you’d like to see how Deluge Studios’ SEO & web design expertise can align with your business goals, increase your company’s visibility on the web, and help you more effectively reach your audience online, give us a call.

Search Engine Optimization of Textual Content
The textual content of your website must be written, analyzed, and/or modified to carefully place keyword-rich content on each page. Writing effective search engine optimized copy is a unique process that requires extensive training and practice to attain maximum competency.

Initial Competitive Analysis Report
Complete website analysis report detailing all issues that are negatively impacting your existing website in terms of search engine rankings – including, but not limited to:
On-site Optimization Issues (alt tags, meta tags, titles, term weight and phrase density, internal linking structure, content hierarchy)
Keyword Analysis (keyword effectiveness, competitive analysis, existing rankings, discovery)
Current Links Analysis (links effectiveness, dead links, linking popularity)
Content Analysis (uniqueness, themes, phrase density)
URL Analysis (query strings, canonical urls, redirects)
Analysis of all site features (blogs, forums, rss feeds, guest books, CMS)

Meta tags & Web Page Optimization
Meta tags are generated based on the selected keyword/phrases and placed on the pages of the client’s web site.

Submission of Web Pages
Optimized web pages are submitted to leading search engines and categories for top placements and positioning.

Link Optimization
Add relevant external inbound links and outbound links to and from other websites. Link Optimization is also a significant factor in Search Engine Optimization. We have learnt from our experience that if websites links are properly optimized that can result into top search engine positioning and placement.

Hand Submissions to Top Search Engines
Manual submissions are the best way to get submitted to search engines. Sit back and let our SEO Specialists do the work for you!
* High quality manual submission – the most effective way to submit.
* Submission to the most popular search engines, including Yahoo MSN and Google.
* Leave it to our SEO specialists.
* Save precious time and avoid the hassle.
* New! Now with MSN Submission!

Complete Image Optimization
* Add a descriptive ALT tag
* Have the image name include your targeted keywords
* Put related content next your image.

Copywriting
This is the text on the page that your visitors see. This is an extremely important factor in search engine optimization because both the search engines and your visitors rely on the text on the page to understand what the page is about.

Reciprocal linking to build your link popularity campaign
Link building requires dedication and consistent effort. It is the most difficult, time-consuming and important task an SEO performs to get a website ranked well. Certain strategies are well known to SEOs, while others are in the realm of the experts or forward-thinkers who puzzle them out. I have attempted to list here many of the link building tactics used by the SEO community.

File Formats Optimization
Beyond simple HTML files, search engines are now indexing other file formats such as PDF files, Word files, Excel files, etc. These files can be optimized to improve the results when search engines index them.

Reporting
There are many types of reports, but for the most part these reports can be segmented into 5 basic groups and all our clients will have real-time statistical information pertaining to their website.
* Ranking / Positioning Report: Lists all keywords by search engines and their respective ranking. The detailed reports include ranking for root and branch pages.
* Original Ranking: Reports current ranking compared to ranking prior to the SEO campaign for each keywords.
* Submission Report: Lists the last time submissions were made to each of the search engines. The detailed reports include specific submission information to the directories.
* Link Report: Lists all new external inbound links from other websites and external outbound links to other websites.
* Search Engine Maintenance Report: Journals all activities associated with a SEO campaign.

Maintenance
At Deluge Studios we continue analyze results and revise tactics to maintain or improve search engine positioning. Optimization work continues long after the optimized site is launched. The continued areas of effort fall into 4 basic categories:
* Analysis and revision of page optimization: To maintain top ranking, SEO Analysts must evaluate the results and make tactical modifications based on performance observations.
* Adaptation to search engine algorithm changes: Search engines are constantly modifying their ranking algorithms. It is not unusual to see several changes each year for each search engine. These changes must be identified and analyzed in order to maintain top rankings.
* External link structure maintenance: Websites change their design. These changes can affect or “break” inbound or outbound external links which can adversely affect website ranking.
* Continued submissions to search engines:Over time, search engines “clean house” and drop older site pages from their database. Sometimes pages are dropped inadvertently. Whether purposely or not, search engines must be monitored continually to be sure website pages are properly indexed or resubmit pages that have been dropped. To improve positioning or placement in search engines, web pages should be re-submitted over the period of time.

Optimization of “robot.txt” file
The robots.txt file is a set of instructions for visiting robots (spiders) that index the content of your web site pages. For those spiders that obey the file, it provides a map for what they can, and cannot index.

Sitemap Creation
A site map is a page on your site that lists and describes all, or at least the most important, pages of your site. A site map is valuable for both search engines and your visitors. For search engines, it makes it easy for them to find all of the pages of your site. For your visitors, it is helpful in navigating your site and finding the information they need and we do it specifically to fulfill the criteria of Google, and Yahoo.

To find out more, give us a call 901.757.8898

This is the question that plagues most business owners not long after launching their new site.

They quickly plug a few industry-related keywords into Google and discover the unthinkable: Their Website is nowhere to be found in the search results ! And even if it is there, it’s buried 9 pages deep. No one’s coming to their site because no one can find it.