The new website features on hold scripts, on hold messages mp3′s and other goodies for visitors. We are also working on a retail in-store music library which should work as a decent link-bait for their website.  Now, I have to give it up to our professional services staff because they have done such a great job on the design part. You’ll find below a screen shot of the website after redesign.

on hold marketing company

To get the complete story about the EarGlue’s website face-lift, and view their website prior to the redesign work, check out a new blog we’ve put together which features and analyzes seo website redesign jobs at http://seowebsiteredesign.blogspot.com .

Post from: SEO Samba official SEO blog

Google Shopping Feed Optimization

Google Shopping is now commanding an increasing importance for online merchants, nevertheless  remarkably few web merchants optimize their shopping feeds in order to succeed with the product shopping search engine index.

Why is Google Shopping important ?

First of all, e commerce website operators should remember that positioning a product listing in the top 3 results for a Google shopping query often translates into a top position in Google Web results as well – see screen shot further down the page. By the way, this is the reason why – can you feel the shameless plug coming? – we have released Vidax a few month ago, a unique E commerce website redesign service (based on SEO Samba and SEOTOASTER) which takes care of all facets of product feeds optimization with an unique open source and pricing model. I especially recommend it if you feel strangled by fees on Yahoo store and other commercial E commerce solutions out there.

Why is size a critical product search ranking factor?

Back to the subject at hands; along with longer description in order to increase relevance, and the consistent use of MPN ( Manufacturer Part Number) which is bound to increase Google’s confidence in your web store product catalog information  (still optional but soon to be mandatory attribute), the choice of your product conditioning might make the difference between sales and no sales. Indeed, three options are given to users in order to sort Google shopping results; by default Google shopping uses product relevance, but users can, and do, sort on price; here we’re suspecting low-to-high is the most common setting picked by users out of the gate – hey, everyone wants a good deal, right? – So where is size coming in ? well if you sell regular size or a small number of units as packs of similar products then your price point is lost in the masses of products, and your listing does not get seen.

What should you do?

Well, you can follow three strategies concurrently;  first you still need to optimize products attributes with good description

length, pictures and as many custom attributes as possible.  In addition, consider proposing both sample product size and smaller product conditioning, so that your price point gets to be lower than the competition and your product listing gets to be on top of the list whenever the Google shopping result page gets sorted on low-to-high prices.  Finally, you can cover it all by offering extra large packs so that you also come up first when shoppers sort their result pages on high-to-low price.

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Top Search Engine Rankings Website

Leading Search Engine Optimisation (as they spell it in Australia) agency Top Search Engine Rankings (TSER) from Sydney – Parramatta  to be exact – has joined forces with SEO Samba.  We encourage you to visit their website (that website got a SEO re design)  found at http://www.topsearchenginerankings.com.au and share this resource with your friends from “down under” in needs of both friendly and very effective Internet marketing services. Dallas Kelso is the leading guy over there, always excited about Internet technologies, he strikes me as the hard working “constant learner” kind of guy with a humble attitude, and that’s exactly the kind of guy you want to handle your Internet marketing strategy.  He has attended classes from Bruce Clay and participated to numerous discussions with other thought leaders in the industry.

The SEO company provides a number of classic marketing services to local Sydney and Parramatta businesses starting with personalized website’s SEO audit,  or search engine marketing strategy but also less commonly found white label services for SEO agencies and seo training services in Sydney. This white-label SEO service should be of particular interest to any marketing firm in the U.S or Europe looking for a reliable partner in Australia and Asia who uses a proven methodology and best of breed set of tools including the advanced and open source SEO CMS shopping cart SEOTOASTER and SEO Samba as white-hat seo software. Welcome on board to Dallas and gang !

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About 0.05% phone conversions, plus 0.2% click to website conversions as this image tells us;

Note that in the meantime regular, unpaid local business listing outperformed the click to website conversion by 2.
I think these results are weak, and Google seems to agree. In a typical Google fashion, they offer this client a refund, and a $100 advertising credit towards Adwords. One can only admire the care Google takes to preserve relationships with small business advertisers. The fact that they came up with his ’compensation’ scheme and a form letter is telling however of widespread dismayed results for this advertising product (If anyone cares to share results to back this up?)
The question I, and probably a some folks at Google too, is why did that product not perform? Has Google already pushed the slicing and dicing of his 1st page SERP traffic to its effective limit?

Post from: SEO Samba official SEO blog

This is not for the lack of warning signs, Google hardly went through the back door, traditional directory and yellow pages publishers have known for some time that major online ad inventory carriers, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook have the upper hand over them. Given the fragmented U.S. market, most yellow pages, directories, and local search properties cannot muster enough audience to build a compelling advertising alternative, even on a local media level.

Maybe for a lack of better idea, a prevailing strategy among directories has been to develop revenues on borrowed time monetizing PPC market inefficiencies while building mostly easy-to-replicate reporting features that are hard to differentiate from a merchant perspective. The bad news is that managing PPC campaigns on major search engines for advertisers has already become an increasingly commoditized service, and competition is only getting heftier among traditional yellow pages and internet-based local search players.

Advertising markets inefficiencies tend to self-correct over time, merchants grow in sophistication, learn to replicate successful endeavors, and move away from local directory providers to become direct customers of the most popular search and social sites. Time and money spent educating local merchants about search marketing turns out to be self-defeating, as it eventually benefits competitive Internet media giants.

We are coming to the tipping point, what are the viable strategies for local directories now?

At SEO Samba, we are proposing to local directories to monetize the only part that search engines can not monetize; the organic results. We think it makes a whole lot of sense, and we welcome all directory marketers to join us and fight back.

Any other long-term viable strategy out there folks would like to share?

Post from: SEO Samba official SEO blog

That’s a pretty mysterious subtitle right? Imagine your ver own medium reading Google’s mind and telling you how the giant search engine is mapping your Web site to concepts in its mind.

Well, that’s my understanding of Google Wheel, the option released by Google last May. From what I read around the blogosphere, most think it’s a useless graphical representation of search results that looks into one’s Web site-related searches. However, when I dug into it, I realized that it wasn’t so much related searches that were used to reach your Web site and mapped in there, as much as a map of what Google thought of in terms of inter-related concepts surrounding your Web site. In a nutshell, “silos.”

I typed in our company brand into Google on May 26 and clicked the “Show Options” link. Here, I realized that somehow SEO Samba had been linked to the concept of “online mediums!!!” Funny, but not quite useful from our standpoint, since we provide a unique SEO software as a service that automates the execution of SEO best practices across vast numbers of Web sites.

Google Wheel

On the next screenshot, I clicked on Google’s cache from my toolbar. Remember that, coincidentally, we’ve changed our homepage headers just a few days ago from “Predictable Search Engine Optimization Results” to “Maximize Organic Search Ranking Performance.” Obviously, Google has not updated their cache yet.

Google Options analyzed

The updated homepage looks now like this;

However, it appears that using the word “predictable” in the H1 tag of our page has linked us to the concept of “online mediums.” Now that we’ve corrected what seems be the only reason why we would be linked to the “mediums” concept, I’ve decided to monitor Google Wheel and find out how it reacts.

On July 15 we see some changes with the wonder wheel’s related concepts for the query “SEO Samba.” The “online medium” concept, or silo, has disappeared, and Google Wheel related a more focused personae for our website.

Concurrently, we saw that our rankings have improved for SEO related queries on Google. However, the Google wheel then reverted to its former state, and as Google added back the same flawed related concepts to the Google Wheel, we saw our rankings slide for our seo focus queries.

On July 23, we see a new development with a brand new Google wheel a lot more conform to our market.

The conclusion, you ask? Well, we know for sure that:

• It took our site six weeks to temporarily get out of these unrelated concepts, or silos, and seven to see Google Wheel map some brand new concepts to our site.

Silos are probably built on a number of factors, but page content and wording does matter quite a bit. A simple word such as “predictable,” for example, can be misinterpreted by Google. Check out the Google Wheel to find out where your site fits into Google’s mind.

Post from: SEO Samba official SEO blog

In March 2000, Nupedia was launch around articles written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. In January 2001, a feeder project with the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, and the supporting technology choice of using a wiki, gave birth to Wikipedia. By the end of 2001, with roughly 20,000 articles, Wikipedia gained serious ground with search engines and quickly overshadowed all but three websites in terms of SERP visibility.

Indeed, we already knew that collaborative writing can create vast amounts of information. However, Wikipedia’s organic search success is due to more than just content and built-in quality control processes.

1. Platform and automation: Highly search engine-optimized pages, navigation, technical readability, and linking structure are all vital. Two hundred and fifty million internally optimized links help Wikipedia’s SEO efforts tremendously. Search optimized internal links across related and high-quality pages make a world of difference, but manual coding is not an option to execute deep links consistently over time.

You also need additional flexibility because your websites and lead generation mini-sites are not geared towards being know-it-all encyclopedias. However, there is good news here because you will augment your clout with search engines by segmenting your content across a number of domains (links spread across root domains is a sign of quality). You need a platform that scales your efforts across multiple domains.

Wikipedia uses MediaWiki. What do you use?
Yes, we know WordPress is a great blogging platform, but, no, it is not an option to scale search engine visibility across vast number of website properties.

2. Quality is key. Content should at least equal that of sites you wish to beat in SERPs. But that’s the only point I will include on that list that requires on-going thinking from your part in the absence of hundreds of thousands of Wikipedians. Interns or offshore writers might be good sources to cost-effectively meet the quality threshold.

3. Volume matters. Thirteen million articles filled with original and relevant content are bound to give you a good level of visibility: Wikipedia counts 165 million inbound links.

But what is less known is that pages start with a small nominal value in terms of page rank. As a result, the more pages you’ve got, the more page rank you create for yourself. And that’s page rank you can pass around throughout your own network of pages and websites. In short, you can keep mostly to yourself. That’s where the next point comes in.

4. Manage link equity. Wikipedia works as a vortex that sucks out inbound link equity (a.k.a. Google Juice) from outside the network (see opening statement) and never sends it back thanks to the systemic implementation of the infamous rel=”nofollow” tag. Follow links within your corpus of websites; follow contextual outbound links to authoritative websites, and use ‘no follow’ tag for others. You can automate most of this too.

Pick a technical framework built to scale and manage exceptions to the rules only. Then write any amount of quality content you can muster, and augment volume over time. For this, obviously I would not recommend any else than SEO Samba as the first multi-site SEO execution platform or SEO Software as a Service. Success breeds more success.

Post from: SEO Samba official SEO blog

See Michel Leconte at SES New York

I’ll be speaking about SEO through the Blogs & Feeds panel at SES New York on March 26. This follows a site clinic panel in SES London this past month where I answered some interesting questions along with Brett Tabke from PubCon and Jill Whalen of High Rankings. Thanks to Chris Sherman for moderating this session. I wanted to give a brief summary of information for a few members in the audience. One person was wondering about SEO-friendly content management systems (CMS). I did not quite feel at ease with the question due to the potential conflict of interest given my position at SEO Samba, so the final answer was more on the general principles that should guide one’s selection of a SEO friendly CMS.

1. Segregate production from the actual publishing/serving of web pages. This is a must if you want to distinguish CMS-related issues from web site issues, which simplifies maintenance and maximizes availability. As a side benefit, you can maximize cross-linking value. Unfortunately, CMSs seldom let you do this.

2. Avoid duplicated content creation and links, or mitigate their potential negative effect by having some kind of canonical URL linking strategy in its place.

3. Stick to page-driven CMSs as opposed to assets-based systems if possible. Assets-based frameworks are harder to understand by end-users.

4. Pick an online solution. It just makes sense to minimize IT involvement as much as possible in these times, and this is where things are heading anyway. If you’re in IT, ride the wave, don’t fight it.

A more detailed review of execution factors can be found here:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/featured-articles/seo-and-cms-best-practices-during-deployment-part-2-001056.php

Now, this being said, at the time I would have loved to complete my answer with the following remark, so if the gentleman from London happens to read this post, this is for you.

I feel that CMSs are the right answer to the wrong question. Given the number of stakeholders in a typical decision process, I’ve seen many CMS-related projects stall, becoming overly complex, expensive, confusing and with no clear ROI for anyone. Between IT, brand and product marketing, sales, operations, and support, everyone has their say in such a project, which results in mentioning all the adjectives associated with the project above.

As a result, I believe the best path is to clearly pin a project’s ownership on a single area of the organization. In many instances, I have seen that the expressed or implied endgame is to generate sales leads. If that is the case in your organization, then sales should be in charge, period. This changes everything. Now you’re not looking for a CMS anymore, you’re looking for a sales generation engine. The priorities are clear: the return on investment can be easily measured and the execution time frame drastically cut down. For that later reason only, pinning down the project on sales will make this approach ROI much greater than the original alternative. While others are still planning, you’re already generating additional sales, or so the thinking goes.

It does not mean that all other departments can be forgotten and sacrificed. It just means you build a solid foundation to incrementally improve and better serve the needs of everyone else within the organization.

In a down economy, shorter, less complex projects with clear driving forces, accountability and ROI make sense to me. Does it make sense to you? Please let me know your thoughts.

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[John Myers] What advice would you give to a small business planning on developing SEO activity from scratch?

You came to right place J. OK, seriously, the first step is to clarify what you are trying to sell and to whom. Make sure you get it right because everything else depends on it, and I have seen many small business owners enlightened by having to go through the SEO process. In fact, I think it should be very much part of the value proposition coming from SEO experts, as there’s a chance that you’re the closest thing to a marketing agency they have ever hired. An excellent resource for this that we feature in the SEO Bootcamp at SEO Samba is Pragmatic

Marketing

Read the rest of the interview here with John here: http://jons-domain.blogspot.com/2009/02/rhythm-and-seo-combined-jon-myers.html

[Motoko Hunt] SEO is no longer just about the web site. Blog, video sharing and so many social media applications are out there. I am sure that it is getting to be very challenging to all the site owners especially to small-medium businesses with limited budget and manpower. Any advice on where to start?

A number of applications (.http://www.twhirl.org/, http://ping.fm, http://friendfeed.com/ ) have hit the marketplace recently that seek to aggregate social channels into a single broadcasting interface. While interesting and useful to their target users, most focus on building as large of a distribution network as possible for individual mass-market users.

We address this challenge differently with SEO Samba and focus on the needs of small and medium business web marketers and giving additional ammunition to our SEO firm partners. We see organic search as a field increasingly going beyond text results indeed. Social applications, news, blogs, video are all “free-to-play” marketing channels but are costly to research, select, manage and integrate with other marketing endeavors. And from a SERP standpoint, there is more to it. As Google puts it in their FAQ, “Social media is great! But there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.” At SEO Samba, we discriminate and prioritize channels to focus on the ones that have the potential to generate highest volume of direct traffic and business activity while improving your rankings in search engines. In addition, we address the manpower challenge faced by SMB by providing a high level of integration and minimizing web marketers’ content creation efforts. For example, our first universal search module (provided free of charge) is a news module that provides a Google News-ready structure, news articles that are search optimized according to your chosen best practices, search friendly scrollers, automated RSS feeds creation, integrated with email newsletter platforms such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response etc. You can publish news across all your sites with a single click then aggregate news items across web sites to create unique newsletters and market to a cross segment of your email list, and, finally, save these newsletters with one click to any of your web sites. Each of our upcoming modules will provide the same level of details to ensure web site visibility, while expanding the least time possible from a user, content writer, marketer and SEO experts’ perspectives.

Read the rest of the interview with Motoko here: http://ajpr.com/wordpress/conferences/michael-leconte

Read the rest of the interview with Jody here: http://www.marketing-jive.com/2009/02/interview-with-michel-leconte-ceo-of.html

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	Webmaster Radio
SEO Samba SEO Automation Platform Michel Leconte, the CEO of the first Organic Search Management Platform SEO Samba, tells us about developing search engine marketing strategies.

Post from: SEO Samba official SEO blog