The last time I wrote a message has been ages ago. This time I just want to the message out that the company I work for indeed totally turned around the de SMO department. I think I introduced the word, but it kind of went unnoticed since it was picked up so fast and it was not really my department. However, I am involved in the project now and my company, be2.nl dating and be2.be dating, needs some more backlinks With this post I am a bit close to reaching the amount of backlinks that I am trying to get. If anybody can help me to get more  backlinks, feel free to put them on your site. And if it is relevant we might even consider an exchange.

Hopefully I will post more in the future or Remco... why don't you past anymore...

Cheers,

Amanda

Today I heard for the first time the term Social Media Optimization. I thought this was a facinating new thing and started researching it. I was amazed that there was already a wikipedia text about it, but most interesting is the social media optimization blog by David Wilson. Apperently it has been existing for quite some while, but why is this term not used more often because it makes so much sense to me...

Everybody in online marketing is constantly talking about SEO, SEM... and all the nice abreviations, but not SMO. I think this should get more recognition, because more and more companies are also starting to use this feature (they are just not familiar with the official term). I will definately try to convince the company I work for to create, next to our SEM, SEO and Display Advertising, to start using SMO for our blog sub-department and soon also including much more that deals with social media. Hopefully my colleague will soon be promoted to SMO manager !

In my previous article I wrote about a question that I wanted to get answered. To be honest I already did some research, but I started at the beginning... The start of the Internet, the beginning of the use of online advertising... Keeping in mind that I wanted to find out more about corporate blogs I bumped into an interesting book, which helped me to get a better view on the internet atmosphere of today. The book was given to me at the Cannes Lions Awards with the title "the social metropolis" by Jimmy Maymann.  
 
The book is about the following: One of the key advantages of the Internet is the possibility to share knowledge; exactly this is what many internet users are starting to realize, by adding their own contributions and creativity to the media landscape. This has also become one of today's struggles for marketing; the rather passive consumer has become an active consumer.  The buzz word for this phenomenon is "Social Media", a new era of the Internet has started and blogging is part of it (which is therefore part of my research)!

To make the social network even more clear Microsoft's Robert Scoble designed together with Daren barefoot "The social media starfish". All the different aspects of social media are being represented in this synopsis, which you can find by going to this link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/1814873464/


The funny thing is that to find this nice overview I already used several of these aspects. First I used Google to look for the social media starfish, because I read about it in the book. The first hit I got was Robert Scoble's blog; http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/02/social-media-starfish/. The next thing I did was clicking on a link in Robert`s blog to Darren Barefoot`s blog. There I watched the original video from Kyte that showed Robert's presentation about the starfish and there was also a smaller version of the starfish, so I clicked on the picture and got redirected to flickr to get the original picture. So just to get the information I needed to use 4 of the 12 aspects. Imagine I got the article that I could not remember in my mailbox and since I think it is very useful I send the link to a friend in a text message plus I put it on our company's wiki and a link on the social network that I use. That would be 8 out of twelve! This simply shows how important these kinds of media have become.

In 2005 Bill Gates, founder and currently chairman of the software giant Microsoft, claimed that eventually most businesses will use blogs to communicate with customers, suppliers and employees, because it's two-way and more satisfying. This claim made me think; why would THE Bill Gates, a guy that knows how to earn his money, claim such a thing if there is not a lot of money to be made with corporate blogs?

Fortune 500 companies did not need blogs before to make their overall marketing efforts successful, so why start making use of blogs now? Online marketing has become very popular since the start of the Internet, but with this popularity it also has become more competitive on the Web. 5 years ago online marketing was totally different than what it is today. Companies have to come up with new and better ideas to increase the return on investment of their online marketing activities. Knowing this, combined with Bill Gates's claim mentioned before, made me wonder if blogs are the key to success in the world of online marketing. I decided to do more research on this topic, so I created a concrete question: Do companies need a corporate blog to increase the ROI of their Online Marketing efforts?

Modifications of the product itself are often required to make the product appeal more to the market this is the so called product adaptation. It can also be necessary to make the product safer, more up to date or more useful for a different target audience, especially on domestic markets. Product adaptation on international markets it is important to adapt the product to the culture.

Things that can differ in different cultures are the taste of the product, the style, the colour, or symbols, language, but also more specific like differences in technology, environmental differences, religion etc. The taste of a product is very important for the food, drinks and cigarette industry. Style is more important in car and fashion industry, which also includes the colour and symbols. The meaning of a colour or a symbol can differ from culture to culture.

The package of the product can also need adaptations. Special symbols and the language need to adapt to the country/culture. Some symbols can be offensive in one culture and be normal symbols in another culture. There is also a possibility that a symbol is not commonly used in a culture and will be misinterpreted. Language differs of course, many things can go wrong concerning languages or translations. The packaging also has to be adapted to the conditions of a country; storage conditions (size of the product), climate, moisture, etc.

Technology can also make a difference if the product is going to be successful on a new market or not. Measurement systems vary between countries and often components need to be modified to adhere to local standards, which can also include the size of the product. Environmental differences are probably more logic; selling ski jackets in warm countries is not likely to be profitable. Some products may malfunction, when they are exposed to extreme heat or cold. Religion or special norms and values can also make a product fail.

Fast Food Chains

Most fast food chains are known for their ability to modify easily, when entering new markets. McDonalds, for example, adjusts its menu for each foreign market; beer in Germany, wine in France, mutton pot pies in Australia, and McSpaghetti in the Philippines. Burger King, Wendys, Kentucky Fried Chicken, they all adapt to the market they are in 'Product adaptation'.

An exception of this successful trend in fast food chains has been Pop-Tarts, toaster pastries that have been quite a success in the U.S.. When entering the British market, they could not set ground there, because the taste was considered to sweet and most people did not have toasters 'Lack of product adaptation' .

Coca Cola's two liter bottle

When Coca Cola tried to introduce their two liter bottle in Spain, they found out that market entry was difficult. This was due to local storage conditions; few Spaniards have refrigerator doors with compartments large enough to accommodate the large-size bottle.

29-inch tables in Japan
One American company tried to sell 29-inch tables in Japan when the average table height is 21 inches due to fact that the Japanese sit on the floor at the table and do not use chairs.

More blunders in relation to product adaptation can be found @ blunders

Seochat.com search engine optimization chatting

An interesting search engine optimization website. They have a lot of articles, that you realy should read. And a shitload of search engine optimization tools all web based, protected with a capcha.I don't like the banner filled design though, but it is still a good read.

DaniWeb Search engine optimization directory

DaniWeb is an exciting community of 132,552 IT professionals who are devoted to offering technology news and editorial blogs, support forums, tutorials, programming code snippets, and so much more.

We are proud the announce that seomagnifier.com has gone live.

As of last week we registered seomagnifier.com at and are very happy with the fast service they deliver. This site will be a continual and public case study on the topic of search engine optimization.

Please not that the forum is not yet open to the public, which will change soon.

We do not offer any paid services at this point, so if you are looking for a company to optimize your site you are looking in the wrong place, for now. We are intending to offer web site optimization services in the future though focusing on close personal contact with our customers.

Last year google introduced the sitelinks for pages that seem to have very relevant content for the search query entered by the user. These sitelinks for those who are not yet familiar with sitelinks, are an extra set of links from the first listing in the serps that give the user extra topics, information from this top ranking site, an example can be found here , it seems that for the query cnn google thinks that cnn.com is so important that extra links from this site should be displayed.

Do we love sitelinks?

In one word we do, it gives your already top ranking site a very trustworthy feeling. People seem to click a lot more on sites containing the sitelinks than sites that don't posses these links.

Sitelinks bug

It seems that google is failing to remove the second listing of a site just after the sitelink listing. So after the sitelink listing for cnn you still get a regular listing for cnn.com, hopefully this will be removed soon as it makes it look a bit spammy.

Which sites get the sitelinks?

It seems that only searches for trademarks get the sitelinks E.G cnn,hp,ebay,intel.... you get my drift. Do a search for any major online trademark and sitelinks seem to appear out of the gloom. What makes these sites so special that they need to get a sitelink listing? Lets take look into this very interesting topic to see if we can find some clues. Lets start with a quote from the google webmaster help center

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for.

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don't think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.

At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We're always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.
Source:

It seems that google have a nice new algorithm to calculate the site link factor for a site. A few things that I have noticed while working on sitelinked web sites are:

• Sitelinks appear only on the first serp listing.
• Sitelinks appear only for a "trademark" search.
• Sitelinks appear to still be buggy.
• Sitelinks appear only on sites that are very old and have a decent amount of content.
• Sitelinks appear mainly on authority sites.
• Sitelinks are still a mystery!

How does Google calculate Sitelinks?

Google claims that the Sitelinks are created automatically. We have several theories as to how google calculates the sitelinks. These theories are based on my best guess.

• Google might track the number of clicks for different results. If a web site gets a lot of traffic for a special keyword then the web site will get Sitelinks on Google's result page.
  For example, if you use a special trademark term on your web pages that cannot be found on other web sites then many people will click on your web site in Google's results when they search for that search term. It's likely that your web site will get Sitelinks for such a search term.
  
• The link architecture of a web site might help. Links at the top of the HTML source of a web site seem to have a better chance to be included as Sitelinks.
  
• Google might use the Google toolbar to determine Sitelinks. The more often a page is book marked the more likely it is that these pages will be used as Sitelinks. Google's toolbar can collect a lot of information about a web site.
• Google might be able to filter out the "trademark" trademarks seem to have the highest risk of obtaining sitelinks.

Final sitelink thoughts

At the moment spending time in order to obtain sitelinks it time not well spend. Your could better spend time to obtain authority site status which gets you a lot of traffic and might in the end get you a sitelink listing. It is how ever so uncertain how to get these sitelinks that it is not advisable to target your site for them.

As many of you might already know our favorite search engine Google no longer thinks keywords are worth it's time. Google simply does not read the meta keywords tag anymore. So the question comes to mind, should we still bother writing the meta keywords tag?

Well for me this was a hard one to answer, many other search engines that could deliver you some traffic still use the meta keywords tag to index the pages.
Should we neglect these engines? I think not, but we should stop putting in a lot of hours working for these low traffic engines.

The solution, automatically generate your keywords using php.

It might sound simple and well it is. We can use some of the nifty php functions to extract rate and collect keywords from a web page and put these inside the meta keywords tag. Might not always give the perfect keywords, but at least these keywords are in the content of the page and are relevant to the text.

Introduction generate your keywords using php

The vessie engine uses smarty as a templating engine, a key feature of smarty is that it buffers the output and sends the complete blocks of content when you want it to. This lets you take the completely generated html from a php web page extract its keywords and place them inside the meta keywords tag. Then it lets you send the content to the browser. This article will however not use the smarty engine, but ill be happy to write a smarty version if users require this. Also please note that vessie uses a completely object orientated coding model view controller style. The reason I left this out is that it is simply to complex to cover this. We mainly want to focus on the task at hand. I do however promote the user of object orientated programming using php quite heavily!

Tell php to buffer its output.

The first thing we need to do is tell php to buffer any output, the reason is that we want to count and manipulate this output.
We can do this with this code at the beginning of your script.
<?php
ob_start();
?>
This starts the output buffering but keep in mind that the output buffer will be send automatically to the browser at the end of a script, to counter this we can use ob_get_clean(); So at the end of your script you can add the following code to stop php from sending all the content in the output buffer before we changed some things, like the keywords meta tag.
<?php
$content = ob_get_clean();
?>
What this does is take the contents of the output buffer and puts it inside the variable $content after it has done this the output buffer is cleaned/emptied.

Counting the keywords.

So now we have a page that outputs nothing, great. We also have the entire contents of the page inside the variable $content, so we can count and input the keywords. To count the keywords I have created a nice and simple to use function, you can use, alter and distribute the function as you like. But you must leave the copyright notice in tact. You should put this function after the ob_start(); call and before you call it at the end of your script.

<?php

   /** 

   * Extract the keywords from the content string and return the keywords string 

   * @param string $content 

   * @param int $minLength 

   * @param int $headingWeight 

   * @param int $linksWeight 

   * @param int $numberOfKeywords 

   * @return bool 

   * @copyright remco verton <info@seomagnifier.com>  

   * @copyright Visit http://seomagnifier.com for more free php scripts 

   */ 

  function extractKeywords($content,$minLenght,$headingWeight,$linksWeight,$numberOfKeywords){ 

      // minimum lenght a keyword must have 

      $keywordArray = array(); 

       

      //Count the link keywords 

      $links = array(); 

      preg_match_all('#<a.*?>(.*?)</a.*?>#s',$content,$links);         

      foreach($links[1] as $key =>$value){ 

          $keywords = explode(' ',strip_tags($value)); 

          foreach($keywords as $id => $keyword){ 

              // Get the alpha numeric value for the keyword 

              $keyword = preg_replace('/[^[:alpha:]]/', '', $keyword); 

              if(strlen($keyword) >= $minLenght){ 

                  if(!array_key_exists($keyword,$keywordArray)){ 

                      $keywordArray[$keyword] = $linksWeight; 

                  } 

                  else{ 

                      $keywordArray[$keyword] += $linksWeight; 

                  } 

              } 

          } 

      } 

      //Count the heading keywords 

      $headings = array(); 

      preg_match_all('#<h(.*?)>(.*?)</h.*?>#s',$content,$headings); 

      foreach($headings[2] as $key =>$value){ 

          $keywords = explode(' ',strip_tags($value)); 

          foreach($keywords as $id => $keyword){ 

              // Get the alpha numeric value for the keyword 

              $keyword = preg_replace('/[^[:alpha:]]/', '', $keyword);             

              if(strlen($keyword) >= $minLenght){ 

                  $divider = (int)$headings[1][$key]; 

                  if($headingNumber == 0)$headingNumber = 1; 

                  if(!array_key_exists($keyword,$keywordArray)){ 

                      $keywordArray[$keyword] = $headingWeight/$headingNumber; 

                  } 

                  else{ 

                      $keywordArray[$keyword] += $headingWeight/$headingNumber; 

                  } 

              } 

          } 

      } 

      // Count the text keywords including the heading and link texts! 

      // Meaning these are counted double once with a rating of 1 and once with the rating set for them! 

      $text = str_ireplace(array('/',"\n",'<br />','<br/>'),' ',$content); 

      $text = strip_tags($text); 

      $keywords = explode(' ',$text); 

      foreach($keywords as $key => $keyword){ 

          // Get the alpha numeric value for the keyword 

          $keyword = preg_replace('/[^[:alpha:]]/', '', $keyword); 

          if(strlen($keyword) >= $minLenght){ 

              if(!array_key_exists($keyword,$keywordArray)){ 

                  $keywordArray[$keyword] = 1; 

              } 

              else{ 

                  $keywordArray[$keyword] += 1; 

              } 

          } 

      } 

      // Sort the keywords 

      arsort($keywordArray); 

      // Take only the number of keywords set in the config 

      $keywordArray = array_slice($keywordArray,0,$numberOfKeywords); 

      return strtolower(implode(',',array_keys($keywordArray))); 

  } 

  ?> 

   

What this function does it count the words inside the headings, links and text. It will use a rating for each and return the number of keywords set in the parameters. If you call the function as per the working example code you will get the best possible result. I will not go in depth on the workings of this function. You won't have to learn how to write one, just use this.

Putting the keywords inside the meta tag.

Putting the keywords inside the meta tag simply requires a bit of string replacing, I have placed this code inside my meta keywords tag: {$keywords}. You can choose any code you want but be sure you will never write this as content and make it descriptive. I chose {$keywords} because it's the smarty way of putting data inside templates. This only requires1 line of php code.

<?php
$content = str_replace('{$keywords}',$kewords,$content);
?>

Putting it all together, adding the keywords to your document.

So now that we have a function, and we know how to replace the {$keywords} code with our keywords how do we continue. At the end of you php file you should add the following lines. This takes the content from the output buffer, extracts the keywords and put them inside the meta tag. After all is well it will echo the content to the browser.

<?php
$content = ob_get_clean();
$kewords = extractKeywords($content,5,20,2,10);
$content = str_replace('{$keywords}',$kewords,$content);
echo $content;
?>

A working example that adds it's keywords to the meta tag.

A working example can be found at working example and the source can be seen at code. Feel free to use any part of this example, it would be nice if you kept the copyright notice in place. If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to leave me a note in my profile.

Adwords is a term used by Google to indicate their pay per click advertising program. You need a Google account and pay a starters fee and then your off. Adwords has a very straightforward, classic pay per click approach and this makes adwords attractive to the first-time user. Adds will be placed along the right side of the seach results, but only for the keywords you choose. Multiple users can bid for your keywords and ranking is done according to the amounth of cash you choose to bid. Like Overture, Google has numerous partnerships with other properties, so that your results appear on many sites, and Google offers you the option to choose on which of these properties your adds will be displayed. Giving you full controle over the target audiance.

Advertisers are guided along the way when opening an account, provided with numerous tutorials, and given access to a variety of tools to help you track and optimize your bidding and keyword choices. With a searchable support database, almost any question can be answered in seconds.

You can decide how much you are willing to spend. Google adwords can be found under , give it a go you will be surprised.

The slogan that Google uses says it all.

Advertise your business on Google. No matter what your budget, you can display your ads on Google and our advertising network. Pay only if people click your ads.

This is the alternative that that can be assigned to a web graphic. This tag is suppose to describe the content of the image and mainly implement as a usability feature by the . Software for the visually impaired can read aloud the contents of the alt tag thus 'giving the person an understanding of the visual message being sent. This tag can be a nice seo bonus tag, by using clear and descriptive alt tags the search engine can find the images. Think about the next scenario: A user is looking for snowball images at google.com and finds on from your website. Google will then display the image in the context of your page. And if your page has more images about snowballs and some very interesting information this user might decide to give your site a try. Be careful with the alt tag though. This tag is not meant as a keyword spamming agent and search engines will penalize any alt tag spamming attempts. See this tag merely as what it is, a helpful tool for the visually impaired, and this category includes the search engines Google, yahoo, msn!

Analytics is used in the seo world to refer to the Google program. Google analytics is a free tool that lets you analise the traffic on your website. It works extremely well and we at seomagnifier used if from the start. At this point in time Google analytics is the standard in external traffic analise's tools. The tool uses a very pretty flash interface. And provides a lot of different reports. You can even define funnel paths and check how your users are using your page.

How analytics works.

The basic analytics works really simple, all you need to do is apply for an account and take a bit of javascript code given during the application and put this in the head section of every web page. This should not take long. We did this by adding the javascript code to the canvas template of our site. After that you can validate that the script works.

Google analytics are processed on a daily basis and it might take up to 24 hours for you to be able to view you reports.

When a site that used to be included inside the search engine index is suddenly removed from this index they might have been banned. Most of the time a search engine ban is caused by stepping over the guidelines set the search engine in question.

The usage of black hat seo techniques can be one of the reasons for this ban. But sometimes a site is accidentally banned by the search engine. In any case, it is now possible if one is banned from the Google index to request to be re indexed. All you need to do is mend your ways, apply for a Google webmaster account and ask for forgiveness. This is done by clicking on the request to be re indexed link in the Google webmaster tools page.

It might take some time for them to respond but be patient, you will get an email telling you what to do and why you were banned form the Google index.

Keyword spamming is the artificial inflation of the keyword density that some SEO companies undertake in an attempt to rank higher. These practices are heavily frowned upon by the search engine companies and are considered black hat seo techniques.

• You should not add many keywords to the anchor texts of links
  
• You should not add many keywords to the alt attribute of images
• You should not add many keywords to the title attribute of links
• You should not add the keywords at random places in the text

Take into consideration that a good keyword density is one between 2-4% meaning that your keyword of keyword phrase should not exceed the 2-4% of your pages total page weight/content

Seo stands for search engine optimization and refers to the process of getting your site ranking high in all of the mayor search engines for a chosen target group of keywords. The main goal of search engine optimization is improving the revenue from the web site by getting a higher volume and or more targeted traffic. There are many seo techniques. In general, these techniques can be categorized as On-Page Optimization, On-Site Optimization, and Off-Site Optimization. We can differentiate between two kinds of search engine optimization specialists, black hat and white hat. Where blackhat seo’s use techniques that are generally considered spam, questionable or prohibited (according to the guidelines); the white hats stick to the rules set by the search engine companies.

Serp stands for search engine result page it is the page that a search engine displays to the user as a result for their query. Usually this page will contain sponsored, directory and search results. Users will stick mostly to the search results; the division is approximately 20% for sponsored and 80% for search and directory results. Often used in discussion of the way such a page is laid out, for example: • "Overture listings are the first sites presented on Yahoo's SERPs." • “We promise you a top 10 serp result in google”

Some 'seo' companies offer tools that let you submit your site to all the major search engines, sometimes even for free. This practise is referred to as automated submissions and is heavily frowned upon by the top search engines. In some cases it is even against their guidelines.Using these tools,and a very nasty example is webpositiongoldwebpositiongold, can be considered black hat seo. It's a sort of spam, you should not take part in these practises, even if they are offered for free, your mail box will explode from the spam could send you.

In any case automated submissions is an outdated technique and should be steered clear of. 

This is the visible text in a HTML link element, <a href="urlhere">anchor text</a>. The text is supposed to be underlined to indicate it links to an other page or piece on content. The anchor text is considered the holy grail of todays search engine optimisation companies. Google the top search engine uses the anchor text to categorise the page it links to.

A nice example is the Google search term , if you enter this text in the search box the top ranking web page is the download page for adobe acrobat reader. The interesting part is that the text is nowhere to be found on their page, they don't use this text as it is considered bad usability. So how come they rank number 1 for . The explanation is as simple as it is interesting. There are so many sites that use click here as the anchor text in the link to download the acrobat reader, that Google rates adobe the number one site. The implication is huge, if you can get tons of links with proper anchor text to your site, you can rank for words that don't even exist on your site. How is that for content is king.... Also note that this adobe page even got site links for this search term, indicating they are the authority site on . We decided to help adobe out and give them a few more backlinks.

Our advice think very carefully when choosing your anchor texts during your link campaigns.

Backlinks are links from other websites to a target website, we can say seomagnifier.com has 1300 backlinks for example. This means that seomagnifier.com has 1300 links on other sites pointing to seomagnifier.com. Sometimes backlinks mean the number of links a search engine counted for a site. We can say soemagnifier.com has 1300 backlinks in Google. This means that Google found 1300 links to seomagnifier.com.

Backlinks in search engines can be counted by using the search command link:yoursite.com where you replace yoursite.com with the URL of your site, duh. Please note that some search engines and the most notre is Google do not show the complete list of backlinks. Google for example displays only a preview of the backlinks for a site, holding of the webmasters trying to 'steal' their way to the top by copying the backlink structure of the top ranking sites.