Yahoo has compromised the integrity of their organic (natural) search results. Recently Yahoo has added a search submit feature that allows any company to purchase their way into the organic results. You can know longer expect that the results you see are the most relative based on the contents in the pages.

Although this is not brand new, it is not common knowledge to most Yahoo users who expect the natural results to be based on the pages content and relevance to what they are searching for. Providing a natural section of search results is what makes a search engine a viable portal to the internet and not just a “Spam” site. You expect to get unbiased information in your natural search results and have the advertising clearly marked and when you remove the distinction between the two, users can no longer trust what they are going to be clicking.

Essentially, Yahoo is not only discrediting their brand as a serious search engine, they are in danger of losing loyalty from the millions of people that currently use Yahoo and have for years in an attempt to increase their advertising revenue.

Yahoo claims that the pages submitted for their “Search Submit Express” are displayed based on the relevance to search terms. But how can the pages be displayed by relevance when the relevant pages that aren’t paying are pushed out of the way to make room for the paid pages? And to further discredit the idea of relevance, this statement is on the programs “How it Works” area. “You must maintain a positive balance in your account for your pages to remain active in the program.” If the pages are relevant, they should be displayed regardless of whether you are paying or not. This completely contradicts the whole idea of relevance and introduces an oxymoronic statement I call “Paid Relevance” in organic results.

More and more SEO professionals are seeing that pages in their websites are not being cached or indexed by Yahoo (regardless of meeting the content quality guidelines) thus forcing more and more companies to consider this option. As more companies engage in this Yahoo program, the more compromised the organic results in Yahoo will be. As you can see, this is a real issue that affects millions of people and how they search.

Why is Yahoo engaging in an activity that so clearly violates what makes a great search engine great? Perhaps it’s because of the market share they continuously lose to their major competitor Google. Perhaps this is an attempt to squeeze the turnip dry. Perhaps this is just a misguided decision that some executives thought wouldn’t be that big of a deal that could increase their ad revenue? I don’t know the reason why Yahoo has put such a program in place but one thing is for sure, Google understands the importance of keeping it’s organic search results and has vowed from day 1 to keep it’s natural results organic.

So you can see in more detail what I am talking about, here is the link directly to the Yahoo program. Enjoy!  http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/sse.php
Thanks,
Brad Henry

Small Business Marketing Options

So you are a small business with a tight marketing Budget, what do you do now?  Well there a several sources you can spend your marketing dollars.  First there is Print Media but before you spend a whopping source of your marketing budget on print, you have to ask yourself a couple critical questions.

1. Who is your target market and will this effectively reach your target market?
2. What is the Call to Action?  Is there any Call to action?
3. What is the purpose of the marketing campaign?

Is this for branding just to get someone familiar with your name or is this to generate revenue.  If you want to actually generate revenue, you need to have a call to action.  If print, you may want to consider putting your website address on the ad.   Print is relatively expensive and has a very short life.  Typically, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are a real estate agent!   There are better sources to allocate your money including online marketing.

Another small business marketing option is to go with radio airtime. This has an even shorter life and can really only be effective if you are trying to gain brand recognition versus immediately generate revenue.  A good use of radio advertising is for fast food, soft drinks, and other stuff that a consumer can have quick access to while driving a car or truck.

Another and in my opinion, the best source to allocate your small business marketing budget towards is online marketing.   When a consumer needs most any product or service, one of the first places they will go to find the product or service is the internet and most likely some form of a search engine.    This is why this marketing medium is so important, because chances are, it impacts your business and if you aren’t taking advantage of it, your competitors probably are.

Online marketing is also one of the most efficient marketing mediums as well.  Once you have optimized your site, you can continue to gain the benefits of the cost well after the cost is forgotten and out of your marketing budget.  But, I wouldn’t toss the SEO firm aside just yet either.  Having someone continuously monitor and increase your visibility can be very impactful in the long run.

Continue to the rest of the Article>>

Blogsvertise; the new age of Blog Advertising. 

Blogsvertise your website!  What exactly is Blogsvertising?  Basically you are paying bloggers to write post or stories about your business on their blogs and include a text link to your site.  They will review your website, and write a relevant story and place it on their website.

You gain a couple benefits from it.  First, and most importantly, you can build your Page Rank by getting relevant, text based anchor links with no indication of them being purchased.  This means you can boost your Page Rank fairly significantly in a much faster time than just having one or two people building links.

Secondly, these articles can serve as a great referral source.  People read blogs, and people will follow links in articles.  By having unique articles about your business all over the web in relevant markets, you increase your exposure and incoming referral sites.

I plan on following this blogsvertise company to see how this all pans out.  I will write some updates to this post over the next couple of weeks but feel free to post your comments here and I will try to reply as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Brad Henry
SEO Consultant

The Internet as we know it now will not be the same five years down the road. What will the internet look like at that point in time? My guess is it will be similar to a virtual world where you are represented by a virtual character. You won’t go to websites or search engines any longer to find what you want. Instead you will go to this virtual world directory and search through a navigation to find the store, product, or whatever it is you are looking for and “teleport” directly to where you want to go. If you haven’t seen the game “Second Life” yet, it depicts where I think the internet may go. Right now, that game has online stores your character can visit and buy psuedo clothing and items but I think over time, this will progress into your character being able to buy real life goods and services that can and will ship the actual products to you in the real world. This would greatly expand the user experience for any type of ecommerce business.

As of now, this is just a game but I am going to keep a very close eye on the development of this because I think it will revolutionize the Internet as we all know it today.

Thanks,

Brad Henry, SEO Analyst
www.seoslap.com

Are you ever curious how to get your blog to show up better for keywords that you may want to be found for? Well it is actually quite simple on one level and intricately detailed on another. For the basic blog, all you really need to do is adjust your Permilinks options to create a static URL structure.

You will probably only want to do this if you have a new blog, otherwise you will loose all of your positions because you won’t have anything on your previous URLs because they will no longer exist. It would take you a couple months to rebound.

Once that is completed, you need to find out what keywords people use to search for what you want to be found for. Sound simple enough? Well if you don’t have keyword research software you can just try to think of how you might search for what you do. Then write a whole bunch of post using those keywords or search terms as your titles. Your blog will probably pull the title into the filename and the Page Title so it does a lot of the work for you.

Once that is accomplished, you will want to submit your stories or post to a number of locations such as digg.com and technorati. There are tons of places that you can submit to but you just have to do a little research on that one.

Well that is the quick simple explanation… I don’t want to go into too much detail at this point because I am writing a couple other posts that will contain the business blog optimization which will go into the intricately detailed approach to blog optimization.

Thanks,

Brad Henry

SEO Analyst