SEO: Google and Twitter

Google recently announced that they are partnering with Twitter to include their real-time updates in search results.

Twitter has virtually created a new medium of communication and information retrieval. For Google, Twitter updates are an interesting source of real-time information on a particular topic.

Imagine you’re planning a ski trip and would like to know weather conditions as of right now. By indexing and displaying Tweeter updates, Google can return real-time results most relevant to your query.

SEO’s should take this into consideration and treat this partnership as another opportunity to optimize webpages via inbound links. Update tweets relevant to your website and link those updates back to the relevant sections of your website to increase visibility and crawl frequency. Update tweets using relevant keywords which you wish to rank for and link it back to your website.

SEO: SEO Basics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the focal point of today’s internet marketing efforts. The SEO process involves improving the quantity and quality of “organic”, or user-generated traffic to a web site.

A number of different factors go into a successful SEO campaign. Providing quality content is perhaps among the most important components of SEO. But focusing solely on quality content will not help you achieve high rankings on popular search engines such as Google. In turn, this content must be logically structured, so as to allow for maximum “user friendliness”, and keyword optimized to allow easy indexing by a search engine.

As internet marketing grows and becomes a more prominent and established field in today’s complicated market place, gaining high search engine rankings allows businesses to reach a wider consumer base. The benefit-cost ratio increases and businesses see a wider marginal return rate on their investments in direct correlation to high “organic” rankings. The first step however, involves creating and designing websites which are not only easily accessed by search engines but are also ranked high for their targeted keyword phrases.

However, upon recognizing the tremendous benefits an aggressive SEO campaign can bring to an online business, webmasters are often tempted to use various “black hat” SEO techniques, such as spamdexing and cloaking to achieve high rankings. Such “black hat” methods often result in the site being banned, temporarily or permanently, from the search engine.

SEO: Introduction to SEO

Search Engine Optimization

In its purest form, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), are various processes which when implemented correctly can increase a websites visibility online.

The goal of SEO is to increase a websites position, or pagerank, relative to the keywords a webmaster wishes to target, and to make that website more relevant both in the eyes of search engines and the end-users.

The goal of search engines such as Google and Yahoo is to provide the most relevant content. Google has become successful by being able to provide the most useful information to the searcher. When Google indexes a webpage, pagerank is calculated in order to distinguish between what it deems to be the most relevant content. Pagerank is based on several factors, some of which include keyword proximity, density, syntax, and links.

Because the algorithms used to calculate Pagerank are based on predetermined factors, SEO techniques can be used to increase your visibility online. SEO involves various elements, both onpage and offpage, which are very important for ranking high in search engines. Onpage SEO involves writing unique and relevant content and coding a website in such a manner that it increases the rankings when a search engine indexes your page. This process involves careful manipulation of the layout, Title and Meta tags, and writing optimized content.  Offpage techniques include link building and social media.

Search Engine Optimization includes four basic components which are keywords, website structure and page layout, internal links and anchor text, and web page popularity. When implemented correctly SEO can make a big difference in whether your website is found on the first pages of Google or on the fifty-first.