Month: October 2007

The top four search engines combined — Google, Yahoo Search, MSN (and its new Live search) and Ask.com — account for 98.3% of all searches in the U.S. Sourc

There are many low-end online survey software, but many are cheesy and lack the professionalism and high-end features needed by Fortune 500 companies. Vovici goes beyond simple survey forms to gather feedback geared to deliver "actionable insights."

Vovici's provides an award-winning survey solution for creating, conducting and analyzing online surveys, all hosted in a secure environment. They provided professionally-written survey templates and sample questionnaires. You can brand the survey with your own logo and images -- a must for corporate deployment.

Advanced features include the ability to pass data into surveys without requiring respondents to reenter information you already know, and defining and assigning role-based permissions. You can also schedule complete email campaigns (invitation, reminder, follow-up and thank-you) and track survey progress.

Visit www.vovici.com to learn more.

Startup software company Yield will soon release an SEO-as-a-service offering. Currently it is in early testing by a few companies and will probably be generally available in early 2008. Yield's service is really three services in one:

• Search engine optimization, where Yield scans your Web pages for keywords associated with content, applies its library of best practices, and recommends changes.
• Second, through graphic representations it will who you how to organize content for increased effectiveness (pageviews)
• They will also provide paid search optimization services.

Yield's service is aimed more at the midmarket than at Fortune 500 companies (who often have in-house SEO specialists and online ad channels).

Read John Foley's article for more information.

Keywords and multiple optimized pages are great, but this can actually lead to "keyword cannibalization" which prevents Google from knowing which page is best to rank.

The solution? Use 301's to redirect pages with this architectural issue and point those old pages to the single source that is your primary, optimized-for-SEO page.

Learn more at SEOMoz

301 Redirects can take a while to register with the search engines, but the wait is worth it

This article references a roundtable of SEO experts answering the "How long does it take to update site-wide 301 redirects in Google?" question:

"So lets say you change all of your urls on your website to a completely new url structure. You 301 redirect all the old urls to the new ones. So how does it take for this to update in Google and other search engines?" source

Sometimes it could take up to a year to update your site in the SEs; in practice (with Google anyway) its usually < 6 months.

Read more at How long does it take to update site-wide 301 redirects in Google?

Web Analytics Packages Compared

Not sure which web analytics package is best for you? Stone Temple Consulting has published a 55-page 2007 Web Analytics Shootout, the results of a nine-month study of seven top Web analytics packages on four different web sites. The report looks at strengths and weaknesses of Clicktracks, Google Analytics, IndexTools, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Unica Affinium NetInsight, Visual Sciences' HBX Analytics, and WebTrends.

Read more about their 2007 Web Analytics Shootout - Final Report

In a great discussion about content relevance, this SEOMOZ article outlines what the author believes are the optimal placements of the primary keyword phrase:

• In the title tag once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (subjective, but necessary)
• Once in the H1 header tag of the page
• At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there's a lot of text content)
• At least once in bold
• At least once in the alt tag of an image
• Once in the URL
• At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag
• Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself (this is a bit more complex - see this post for details) source

It it hotly debated if the H1 or the H2 tag is more relevant; many pundits on SEOMOZ will claim the H2 tag is more important, at least with Google.