Yes, having keywords in your URLs does help with SEO, but search engines react differently to keywords in the actual domain versus keywords that appear tacked on to the URL string.
Keywords in the URL String
www.fakedomainname.com/widgets/
Say you’re trying to rank for the keyword “widgets.” Having “widgets” in the page URL string (after the .com) may affect rankings slightly. The real benefit is click through rate. Since search engines display the keyword you searched in bold in the search results, more people are likely to click on your listing. The key is that you have to be ranking well in the search engines for people to even see your listing. This is probably not worth rewriting all of your URLs for, but definitely worth considering for a new website.
Keywords in the Domain
www.widgetsrus.com
Choosing a domain that contains one or some of your keywords can have slightly more of an effect on your SEO efforts than just having the keywords in the URL string. In fact, if you don’t already have an established brand or domain, it’s helpful to even work keywords into your brand name and/or any tag lines associated with your brand. Just like people will begin to associate your brand with your keywords, search engines will recognize the relevance of your website to those keywords.
Exact Match Domain
www.bluewidgetsraleigh.com
If you don’t already have an established brand or domain, choosing a domain that is an exact match to a top industry keyphrase can have a major effect on your SEO efforts. Keyword choice and finding a domain that is available is the hard part. We can only speculate why having an exact match domain is worth so much, but it’s likely search engines think someone searching for “blue widgets raleigh” is actually trying to look up the bluewidgetsraleigh.com website.
It’s also possible that having a domain that is an exact match to a top searched keyphrase in your industry means that you were an early presence on the web for this topic and possibly a leader in the eyes of the search engines.
Signal was honored at this year’s Triangle Ad Club ADDY® Awards with one Gold ADDY for self-promotion collateral along with two judge’s choice awards for individual favorite and for copy. The winning collateral piece was a poster created for Classic Graphics, a Research Triangle printing company, to promote its annual barbecue event. Signal was given full creative carte blanche and chose to spotlight traditional North Carolina barbecue side dishes on this year’s poster.
Signal's Award Winning Poster
Signal’s Gold-winning entry now moves to the District ADDY Awards competitions by virtue of taking top honors in its category. District winners are then forwarded to the third tier, the national ADDY® Awards competition. The ADDY Awards is the largest creative competition in the country with over 60,000 local entries competing in nearly 200 cities.
Check out Signal’s Facebook page for more photos of the event.
web marketing 101 Raleigh NC
Bryan Kristof and Hollace Dowdy presented at this week’s Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) Conference. The seminar, entitled Web Marketing 101: Google, YouTube and Your Web Site, was held at the Raleigh Marriott City Center.
The seminar was a 60-minute no-nonsense crash course in search engine marketing, online videos & web site design, to help attendees achieve the highest impact possible from their web sites. The seminar also featured a case study discussion about the award-winning McKim & Creed web site, created by Signal and recently recognized by ZweigWhite and the Construction Writers Association for outstanding design.
Kristof is the director of marketing at Signal, where he helps clients build powerful brand strategies and integrated marketing programs. He also leads the company’s new media and web marketing initiatives and offers diverse experience with web strategy, search engine marketing, email marketing and web analytics. Dowdy is an account executive at Signal, and is responsible for new business development and managing client accounts throughout the Triangle area. She also serves on the SMPS SERC 2009 Communications committee, where she has been responsible for creating and maintaining the conference website.
You can visit that site, created by Signal, at http://www.smps-seregconf.org/ to learn more about this seminar and other conference highlights.
Google, Yahoo and MSN announced last week they are partnering to support a new Canonical URL tag created to help reduce duplicate content issues. As it stands, when search engines discover URLs with essentially the same content they group them into a cluster and select the “best” URL to represent that cluster in the search engine results. But by adding this new HTML tag to a web page you are indentifying it as your preferred URL to the search engines and the version you would like indexed.
Why is duplicate content even an issue? From a user’s standpoint, duplicate content is a nuisance. Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so users have a good, diverse selection of information relevant to their search query instead of a poor selection of duplicate articles or even slight variations of the same article.
Having duplicate content can be a headache for a web site owner too. Certain types of duplicate content can have a negative effect on your site’s performance in the search engines. Oftentimes multiple versions of the same URL are created accidentally by category URL systems, session IDs and other basic site development issues, as well as some marketing tactics. See Google Webmaster Central to learn more about duplicate content caused by URL parameters.
In many cases this new tag is the best way to communicate your preferred URL, but a permanent redirect is still necessary if the duplicate content is on a completely different domain, or if you need to transfer page history or consolidate link credit. Check out SEOmoz for more technical details on how the new Canonical URL tag works.
As social media titan, Facebook, celebrates its fifth birthday, it seems that the members of the Facebook community are maturing as well. Currently, the fastest growing demographic of site users is women aged 55 and up. A recent tally counted over 717,000 members in this group, marking a 175% increase in number since 2008.
While the growth of this demographic is certainly noteworthy, members of Facebook who are over age 55 account for only 3% of total users. Those who believe that the site is dominated by a much younger crowd, however, might be surprised to learn that teenagers make up only 12% of total users.
To learn more about Facebook’s changing demographics, check out this article written by Helen Leggatt on BizReport.com.
By now, you’ve probably heard of Web 2.0, the new age of Internet use involving information sharing and social collaboration, but lately it seems like an even more innovative take on web communication is on the rise. Social media and networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can be considered the poster children of Web 3.0, but the term is most notably characterized by the shift from “containers” to “objects.”
Tom Wilde, an expert in search engine optimization (SEO,) explains this shift in a recent blog post on SearchEngineLand.com. A short time ago, consumers had to buy an entire album to listen to their favorite song, flip through a magazine or newspaper to read a certain article, and tune into a television network to watch a beloved show. Today, with the introduction of iTunes, Hulu, and countless other web sites and tools, users can find the exact object that they are looking for while bypassing their usual containers.
This presents an interesting challenge to publishers, who must now consider how web users discover their material and cater to this when they publish. Also, how will Web 3.0 affect Internet giant, Google, if the search engine provides links to containers (web sites,) rather than specific objects?
Read the post to learn more of Wilde’s thoughts on the future of the web.
More than a year and a half ago Google began blending results from its specialized channels, like Video, Images, Local and more, into one universal search engine. What this means for today’s Google users is (hopefully) a selection of more relevant results. A search for “inauguration” for example, now returns a blend of News, Images, Video clips, Blog posts and Website results all on the first page and ranked in order of relevance.
What does this mean for a company looking to gain more visibility in search engines? On one hand optimizing web pages for organic visibility in Google has gotten more and more difficult, particularly in cases where the much-sought-after real estate of the first page results has been divvied out into some of these other categories. On the other hand, blended search results mean there are now more opportunities for visibility. To take full advantage of all blended search has made available, today’s search marketing strategy must be all-encompassing, from claiming your Local Business Listing in Google Maps to optimizing press releases and more.
Of these opportunities, online video is predicted to show huge growth in 2009. According to a survey by PermissionTV, 67% of US Marketers plan to focus their online marketing budget in online video in 2009.
Online video major focus for marketers in 2009
Adding video to your marketing strategy or repurposing existing video for increased online visibility could be the right move for your company. For one, adding videos to your website can help increase conversions and convert visitors faster. In addition, videos actually stand a much better chance of ranking in the top ten than any given web page. When done right, adding videos to your website can even make your site more relevant to users, which helps you rank better in Google. The sooner you can get started the better.
When scouring the internet for certain corporate logos, Greg came across a great site that contained exactly what he needed. Http://vectorlogo.blogspot.com is very helpful for finding and downloading corporate vector logos. Thanks for sharing, Greg!
Perian: The swiss-army knife of QuickTime
Justin came across this plug-in for Quicktime. It will pretty much allow you to play and export anything out of Quicktime – including Flash videos – which is pretty cool. It’s free to download and easy to install. It really comes in handy when you are previewing clips in different formats.
http://www.perian.org
Thanks Justin!
Marketing Assistant Kasey Huller has become a Google Certified Individual in the Google AdWords Advertising Professionals Program. The program is an online training and recognition tool for search engine marketers that provides education on managing paid search initiatives. This recognition signifies that Kasey has successfully completed the Google Advertising Professionals Exam, which demonstrates paid search management expertise. Achieving Google Advertising Professional certification is considered a distinction within the search marketplace.
Kasey is the second Signal employee to achieve this certification and will be a valuable addition to our PPC management services.
For more information visit, Google AdWords Qualified Professional.
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