What is better than a catchy title to grab your attention? According to a survey published on Journaldunet.com with Matt Cutts, in charge of SEO for at Google, people pay too much importance to their Pagerank and seem to forget the other 200 algorithms.

Over the past few years, more and more people have specialized in web positioning, but they tend to forget that the Internet is a real race! What worked yesterday might not be valid tomorrow. Be careful of those who only swear by the importance of your Pagerank. Today, several factors affect your positioning such as your keywords, the tags you use, the use of CSS style sheets, the fastness of your pages, their conformity with W3C, the freshness of the text and last but not least the geolocation.

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Loading of pages in Google algorithm

Newly taken into account in Google’s calculation for positioning, the loading of pages has become a key factor. Both visitors and search engines don’t want to wait for hours to load a page. They want it to be fast. This change has affected about 1% of requests, which represents 1 million websites.

Geolocation

Displaying the right content to the right person has become essential to search engines. There is an increasing number of websites and screening has become necessary. Many applications on the iPhone use geolocation. Indeed, when you walk in the street, you want to know that the shop or restaurant you are looking for is close to where you are. Actually, it is the same for the Internet. You don’t want to find a shop in China prior to a shop in Canada. Moreover, people have got used to typing several keywords when searching, like “construction Montreal” or “Festival Montreal 2010”. Consequently, it is important to target niche markets. Not only it will be easier for you to position yourself on the web but also costs per click (CPC) will be less expensive than a unique bilingual keyword such as “construction” or “festival”.

The freshness of the text, news on demand

When the rumour started about Michael Jackson’s death, people who typed “Michael Jackson” on Google were not looking for information on his discography but the wanted to check if the rumour was right. That’s why Google watch reliable news websites and social media like Twitter. By optimizing your website through applications like “Share This”, people will be able to relay your articles and they will quote you on social media websites. Isn’t it a good viral campaign? And don’t forget to use the “hashtags” on Twitter, like: #michaeljackson, #mj, #kingofpop.

The end of the keyword meta tag

Do we have to believe everything Google says? I don’t think so. Maybe this tag was abandoned by Google but what do other search engines think? Don’t forget, we may do it well for everyone while we are at it.

Keyword positioning

The repetition of keywords as well as the use of relevant titles in pages are important factors to consider for a good positioning. If your keywords are not redundant enough, Google will say that your website is irrelevant and too vague. On the contrary, if your keywords are too redundant, Google will consider that you are repeating yourself. An average of 2% to 6% is a good ratio for keyword density.

Pages connate to keywords

Pages with similar results can be found with the use of Google Squared technology. This means that Internet users will be able to find your website after a connate search. For example, if you type “Barack Obama”, results on other presidents might appear.

Sitemap

It has now become possible to link images and videos to each url in sitemaps in order to optimize results.

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Hello everyone!

If I say Bing, you tell me… Microsoft search engine.
If I say “summary tool, keyword and back link”?… Hello!! Is there someone here??

Here is a brief presentation of BING tools at the disposal of webmasters.

SUMMARY
This tool helps you visualize if your website has been considered by BING as well as its indexation level, the date on which MSNbots were sent and the 5 most visited pages of your website according to BING algorithm. This table summarizes the usefulness of the SUMMARY tool:

KEYWORD
Here you’ll visualize the page ranking of your website according to a specific keyword. Unfortunately, no additional functionality gives details on your search.

BACKLINK
This tool helps you visualize all the incoming links you have towards your LinkDomain, your subdomain and even a specific subfolder of your site! You will also be able to create a dashboard .csv with several thousand results. A big job of stat analysis must be done! For outbound links, BING offers a similar tool called OUTBOUND LINKS TOOL.

CRAWL
Rubbish URLs like “Error 404” are over. Thanks to MSNbots, this tool immediately shows you the problems encountered on a specific page. However, be careful: “pages notified as infected by malware may contain corrupted images and documents as well as potentially malicious JavaScript codes or ActiveX controls” says Microsoft.

Finally, following the example of Google, BING offers a SITEMAP tool helping your page indexation by search engines.

Of course, BING offers other functionalities but I’m running out of time to explain them all. Come and meet me at my office! I would be pleased to explain and show you the secrets of BING.

Talk to you soon!

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Hello everybody,

The title of this article says a lot on what I think, especially after reading the figures hereunder compiled by Efficient Frontier and Marketing Sherpa.

However, I want to remind you that paid positioning (SEM) is essential when it comes to tackle the event field, the launch of a new product or service, or even a seasonal activity.

So, what does this survey say? Firstly, investments in SEM have risen by 21% in the United Kingdom over the first quarter of 2010.

Secondly, more than 30% of American companies using paid positioning resort to tools to copy keywords used by their competitors. It is really stupid, especially when you learn that these figures were obtained from $25 000 campaigns or more!!!

Inherently, SEO is made to distance oneself from others… benchmarking doesn’t have its place here!

The study is even more worrying when we learn that paid positioning (SEM) represents more than 80% in “Search” (SEM + SEO) investment in 2010.

Where are we going? Why do companies persist in spending huge amounts of money while a good SEO and SEM job would allow them to generate more considerable earnings without much investment?

To sum up, we can say that search engines are those making profit of the situation… In 2009, in the United States, search engines generated more than $65 per Internet user (it is 4 times superior to the international average)… Just think of it!

Have a good week!

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Hello dear web-marketers!

Today I’m going to talk about Google Webmaster Tools which will soon contain three new applications:

SIDEWIKI

Launched in September 2009, this extension enables you, through an icon appearing on the Google Toolbar or on Google Chrome, to publish and share comments about a web page. Shortly, Sidewiki should give the opportunity to broadcast these comments via social media platforms.

The owner of the page will be able to publish a text which will appear above all other comments.

As a result, Sidewiki might change some SEO methods. We’ll see…

FETCH as Googlebot

This tool was launched during the last quarter of 2009 and is already available on Webmaster Tools. It enables you to understand how Google robots work. The new thing is that its mobile version should be available over the next few months. Fetch will give the possibility to designers to optimize web contents in terms of indexation.

MALWARE

Launched at the end of 2009, Malware identifies web pages (HTML, JAVASCRIPT, FLASH) containing viruses and alerts the owner so that they can find a solution to the problem as soon as possible. The harmful source lines of code (SLOC) are clearly identified by this tool.

At the moment, Malware is being tested and will be available to webmasters soon.

See you next week for new spicy information…

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Dear web investors,

As we have already said on this blog, you won’t see any promising results if the traffic on your website is low or inexistent.

Recently, the Electronic Business Group has released the “Internet Marketing 2010” book from the e-marketing red books series.

Of course it won’t be as good as the work SEO, SEM and SMO experts can do, but this book might increase your web marketing knowledge. Here is one of the few tips given in the book:

Create a successful SMO campaign in 12 steps:

1. Get down your pedestal.
2. Concentrate on needs to satisfy, influences, sites on which traffic is important, competitors’ positioning…
3. Imagine a service answering an identified but unfulfilled need.
4. Make sure the Internet user can take part in the construction of your project.
5. Spread information again and again on most suitable social media websites.
6. Adapt your communication to your public: you don’t write the same way on a blog or on Facebook for example.
7. Use well-adapted and long-lasting avatars on social media websites.
8. Leave easy ways of spreading communication to your Internet users.
9. Follow-up regularly with your community by nominating a “community manager”.
10. You can’t control everything. Just admit it!
11. Make sure you have enough energy to implement your project.
12. Build a long-lasting relationship. We know that the ROI in SMO is proportional to the length of the operation. Think of a long-term action and optimize it!

Have a nice week!! Don’t hesitate to leave your comments or suggestions. It will be a pleasure to answer them.

See you next week!

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