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Hitwise Launches Paid and Organic Search Tools

December 5, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Hitwise today announced the addition of several new features to its Search Intelligence™ product, including Paid and Organic and Fast Moving Search Terms data.

Hitwise Search Intelligence™ provides the industry’s deepest and timeliest search behavior analysis available and is part of the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence service, which is based on how 10 million U.S. Internet users interact with more than one million websites on a daily basis.


The new features enable marketers to pinpoint opportunities to refine keyword portfolios and improve the effectiveness of search marketing campaigns.

Paid and Organic reports allow marketers to analyze which paid terms and organic listings have been most successful in driving traffic to competitive websites.
Fast Moving Search Term reports identify the terms that have increased in popularity each week across all search engines. This data can identify emerging search behavior trends to better understand what is top of mind with consumers.

Filed Under: HitWise, ppc, SEO

Having Duplicate Content Panic Attacks?

November 22, 2007 By Leave a Comment

First – Relax. You will be fine

Despite what some may say there is not a Google “penalty” for duplicate content.

The word is “filter”. Google is not trying to punish sites for having duplicate content. They are trying to please their users. If multiple pages showed up in search engine results for the same content, then Google has failed to do its job. It makes sense to only show one site. Therefore, Google will filter out site from a search query that returns the same results. As a user of a search engine, that’s what I want.

Now that you know the Google is not evil, what should you do?

Yes, Google will only show one page if it is a duplicate of another. However, Google is also smart enough to know what page to show. If the site is gathering quality links and traffic, then that page will be the page that eventually takes over.

That is not to say search engine penalties do not exist, but hopefully that’s not you. Penalties are reserved for those attempting black hat techniques. These sites are intentionally trying to mislead the search engines. However, these are exceptions. Despite what the blogs may say these penalties are rare and usually happening to sites that are expecting the penalty. These are the so called “throw-away” sites. Deceptive web site owners intentionally break the rules for instant gratification, with the expectation that their site will get banned. Then, they open up a new site. However, for the average company who is worried about brand awareness, this is a non-issue and so is duplicate content.


If you find yourself having duplicate content, it’s not the end of the world. Yes, it is best to avoid duplicate content, but it some cases it’s inevitable.

Below are some basic guidelines to improve duplicate page filters:

  • Extra Content – Wrap the content around consumer-generated content, such as reviews, notes, comments, etc.
  • Unique Titles – Change the page titles on all pages. Even duplicated content needs unique title tags.
  • Link Bait – Focus extra link building efforts on the primary site.

It’s important to keep in mind; duplicate content is not a new issue. Search engines have always tried to filter the results. And for the most part, they do an excellent job.

Duplicate content is not the end of the world and it can be overcome.

* Find more articles from John W Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com/

Filed Under: duplicate content, Google, john ellis, SEO

Ultimate Local Search Optimization Resources

October 4, 2007 By 19 Comments

Local Search is becoming essential in many businesses’ digital marketing strategy. With all major search players (Google, MSN, Yahoo, ASK, AOL) providing pristine real estate for local search results, businesses can’t afford NOT to invest into local search optimization strategies. Search Engines such as Google make it very simple for businesses to submit their websites into its local search index, therefore you can find more and more companies taking advantage of local search services. There also many search engines which primarly focus on “Local” such as Super Pages and Local.com. These engines serve up millions of pages views a month, which means companies need to evaluate these secondary avenues of traffic as well because they can lead to increased online visibility. Below are some useful local search optimization resources you should consider before executing your local search strategy.

Local Search Engines

Local Search Optimization

Have a resource that should be added? Leave a comment and I will review it

Filed Under: Local Search, SEM, SEO

What is SEO?

September 6, 2007 By 1 Comment

With a lot of discussion lately if SEO is dead or not, I thought I would step back to see how others define Search Engine Optimization. Before we can tell if it’s dead, let’s see what it is. Below are definitions from several popular website.

MarketingProfs.com – The altering of a Web site, Web pages and links to Web sites and Web pages to improve visibility, rank and relevance in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines.

WebsiteNova.com – This is the process of making a website ‘search-engine-friendly.’ Search engine optimization is primarily used to increase rankings in SERPs, and effective SEO can increase the potential of your website and bring in more traffic.

Wikipedia.com – A set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings.

SEOmoz.org – … the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.

Webopedia.com – … the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine

All of those are very good definitions from very reputable sites. I use several of them often. These definitions seem to have one thing in common: traffic. SEO brings in traffic.

That is good at a basic level. SEO is definitely not dead, it’s just elementary. Traffic is good, but quality traffic is better. SEO is needed and appreciated, but it’s important not to stop there.

As mentioned before, if you are looking for help: You need a Search Engine Marketer, not an SEO.

** Find more articles from John W Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com/

Filed Under: john ellis, Search Marketing In House, SEO, SEO In House

Back to Basics: 5 Easy tips for higher Search Engine Rankings

July 12, 2007 By Leave a Comment

With all the talk over the latest search engine optimization buzz words, we often forget about the basic necessities for search rankings. Yes, all of those advance techniques work, but only if every effort has been exhausted through the basic fundamental steps for obtaining higher search engine rankings.

I often get questions about all of the advance search techniques and how to implement them. Then I look at the site in question and realize we have a long way to go before we attempt those.

It’s good to step back every now and then to get back to the basics.

Five Basic (and Easy) Search Engine Optimization Tips:

  1. Title Tag – This is still the most important thing that can make a difference in rankings. Others may not agree, but I hold strong on this. To get decent ranking, the title tag must include highly targeted keywords. If necessary to include the company name, put that at the end. Don’t waste that valuable real estate with vanity.

  2. Search Friendly URL’s – The URL’s of the site needs to be short and concise. Ideally, they should also include a keyword that is relevant to the content of the page.

  3. Quality Content – It is said over and over again, but yet most still do not do it. It’s important for a site to contain quality information. Web editors do not need to focus on writing to please the search engines. If the content is well written and user friendly, then it probably is search-friendly. If not, sprinkle in a few keywords afterwards, do not adjust the content to please search engines. That only makes for an awkward user experience.

  4. Link Building – The important word to remember about getting other sites linking to your site is “quality”. Focusing on a handful of popular and related sites help popularity a lot quicker than mass link building efforts. It is also not enough to have just a link. The text of the link needs to include highly targeted keywords. A link needs to tell the search engines the keywords that are associated with that link.

  5. Site Maps – This is probably one of the easiest things to do, even for a novice. Having one central page that tells the search engines the layout and link structure of a website make a big difference. Using this opportunity to connect highly targeted keywords with specific pages is a great way to give each page it’s own boost in rankings.

Keeping these basic fundamentals in mind search rankings will move up.

** Find more articles from John W. Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com/

Filed Under: john ellis, rankings, SEO

Is Flash Search Engine Friendly?

July 9, 2007 By Leave a Comment

SEOs have always been hesitant in recommending the use of Flash within websites and the Search Quality Team over at Google’s Webmaster Central Blog has confirmed these hesitations.

Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing…..even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can

The author of the article, Mark Berghausen and his team also have some recommendations for the “honest web designer” and how to best use flash:
  • Use Flash only when needed such as for rich media and not for primary content
  • Leverage sIFR so that non-Flash reader can read the page
  • Make sure you leave an HTML link on splash screen which are comprised of Flash

Although Google can’t index Flash files with the same performance as they do textual content, I see this barrier being removed as Google’s Spiders become increasingly smarter. Until then, it’s best to use flash wisely.

Read the full post here.

Filed Under: Google, SEO

Guest Blogging at SearchEngineGuide

July 2, 2007 By 2 Comments

Thanks to Jennifer Laycock and team, I have been given the opportunity to guest blog weekly at SearchEngineGuide.

I really enjoy writing/blogging so I think this will be a lot of fun and I will probably take advantage by blogging more than just once a week. You can catch some of my posts on the SearchEngineGuide home page or here: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jasra/

Filed Under: Blogging, SEO