SEO Traffic King

Food Network, talk show TV chef Rachael Ray is said to be devorcing her husband John Cusimo.

High on the list of “rachael ray” searches, we’re seeing “rachael ray divorce john cusimano,” “rachael ray divorced,” “rachael ray getting divorced,” and “rachael ray divorce rumors.” Both men and women from ages 35-44 are concerned, but the men happen to be a smidge more interested.

Ray responded to the rumors about the state of her marriage with John Cusimano in July and again in November, but the speculation won’t go away.

The Google LatLong Blog announced they have updated Sky in Google Earth with new content, features and API integrations.

To see Google Sky, click “Switch to Sky” from the “view” drop-down menu in Google Earth, or click the Sky button on the Google Earth toolbar.

Here is a list of new features and content that can be found in the new Google Sky:

• Featured observatories: images from NASA observatory satellites including x-ray images from NASA’s Chandra satellite; infrared images by the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS); ultraviolet images by the GALEX Satellite; and a microwave map of the sky by the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP).
• Earth & Sky Podcasts: Podcasts about stars, galaxies, planets and events coming up in the sky from the NPR program Earth and Sky.
• Current Sky Events: Contains timely updates on recent cosmological events from VOEventNet.

Microsoft Agrees to Buy Fast Search for $1.23 Billion from Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is buying FAST Search. The Norwegian search company, Fast Search & Transfer ASA, will be bought by Microsoft for 6.6 billion kroner or $1.23 billion. Microsoft will buy the company via the Oslo Stock Exchange, share by share. Here is the release from Microsoft.

FAST’s share price rose 41 percent to 18.8 kroner from the news. Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division said:

“Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people find, use and share critical business information quickly.”

Raikes’s unit, Microsoft’s largest in terms of sales, is looking for new ways to grow since many existing customers already own the basic Office suite of word processing, spreadsheet and e-mail software.

The purchase will be completed in the second quarter of 2008, Microsoft said. Shareholders with 37 percent of Fast Search’s stock, including Orkla ASA and Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe, have already accepted the offer and the company’s board unanimously backs the proposal, according to a statement sent through the Oslo Stock Exchange.

Fast Search, which posted losses the past two quarters, has cut jobs to reduce costs and revive earnings. The company expects to be profitable in 2008.

Fast Search reported a third-quarter loss of $100 million, after a loss of $26 million in the second quarter. The company, which started in 1997 and went public in 2001, had sales of $163 million in 2006. It posted a profit of $3.5 million that year.

Microsoft plans to carve out a share of the business-search market, building on corporate demand for its Windows and Office software. Besides handling search, SharePoint lets corporate workers set up Web sites, organize documents and collaborate on projects.

SEO Traffic King Conclusion: The rest of this industry is going to consolidate fast.

More about the Fastsearch Company
Fast Search set up thier company in Norway back in 1997, they have grown rapidly to become a global organization with offices across six continents. They are at the forefront of search technology.

My first post in 2008 will be about the value of SSM or for you 3 letter acronym haters “Social Media Marketing.” I have repeatedly evangelized the intrinsic worth of social media communities and there role in today’s Internet marketing.

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through various social media channels. It is simply another SEO strategy of obtaining links, getting attention and if done right can lead to a massive amount of free traffic. The key here is learning how to harness this low-cost promotional method. This entails understanding the concept of viral content, link baiting and a through understanding of the social media channel you are engaging.

What is viral content? Viral content is self-propagating practice or pattern of Internet use that moves from person to person. Viral content is a brilliant concept and is especially important when you’re looking for traffic or attention which is at the heart of SSM right? Viral content engages the reader, viral content is what people vote on, and it is what they bookmark and share with their friends and family. Viral content tends to spark emotions and debate. Crafting Viral Content takes time and care to produce, and it shows in the finished product. Viral content is also the foundation of a good linkbaiting campaign.

The next question I always get is what is linkbait? Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Link-bait is a component of SEO and marketing, link baits work to increase inbound links, organic search and referral traffic to a site. Link baiting from social media marketing produce two types of traffic sources. The first traffic source is the direct result of your social media campaign you simply get a large amount of visitors who come from the social media channel itself. The secondary traffic is considered referral traffic, because it comes from webmasters which read your post on the social site and decided they wanted to blog about your viral content, company or point of view. These inbound links have several benefits the first being the increase in visitors (free traffic) and the second comes from the direct result of multiple inbound links. Soon the Google Gods will bless you with higher PR ratings to your internal pages.

Ok, I hear what some of you are saying out there… Richard I now understand what viral content is and how link baiting works tell me more about the benefits!

Here are a few:

• SSM provides a low-cost promotional method
• Increase in links
• Increase in Search Engine Rankings
• Generates two types of traffic - Direct traffic and Referral traffic
• Helps build your brand awareness
• Helps build awareness in your website, product or service
• Helps build your reputation management or company (profiles)
• Increase word of mouth
• Increase in bookmarks or social tagging
• Increase in RSS Subscribers
• Helps build community popularity

Conclusion, as you can see the benefits of marketing in the social media channels are far too numerous to sit on the sidelines and not participate. Create a strategy; pick a social media channel to target. Read blogs on how to market successful within each of the major social media channels. (i.e. Digg, Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn &, del.icio.us) Once you start you will see the benefits begin to grow and grow and in no time you will be a SMM master!

To help get you started on your SMM adventures read these five marketing articles!

1. How to Become a Digg Top User (without doing anything shady)
2. Reddit - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About It
3. Internet Marketers Guide to StumbleUpon
4. 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally
5. Effective Marketing on LinkedIn

On a side note, with all of the above, it is important to find as many ways as possible to track the success of your social media campaign. Tracking the success of your campaign comes in many forms and depends on your goals. I will touch upon SMM ROI tracking in a future post!

Also read: Social Media Optimization (SMO) using Social Bookmarking

Search Engine Optimization For Images

Images are great they make the whole experience of web browsing that much better. The problem is Search Engines can’t read them, neither can mobile devices nor screen readers. So don’t let the picture tell the whole story of the page. The key is to make sure your site is accessible and can be understood by visitors viewing your site with the images turned off. If you do that, the SE’s will properly index your site. Here are 3 simple steps to ensure proper Google Image Indexing:

Best SEO Image Practices

1. Take advantage of alt tags for all of your images. Alt attribute was originally developed to display alternate to the image i.e if the image doesn’t load on the browser the alt text loads explaining what image was supposed to be there. Selecting a good filename for the image is a good SEO practice. Select a name that suits the content of the website. For instance, alt text such as “picture1″ or “image1″ doesn’t provide much information about the image. “Soaring Blue Bird” and “Honeycomb Shades Almond Color” give more details for Google Image Indexing.

2. Don’t overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don’t stuff it with extra keywords.

3. Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? One way of looking at this is to look at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?

Taking advantage of Google Image search

Shoppers are now more then every relying on image search to see the things they want to buy. If you have a retail site, make sure that you have images of your products (and that they can be easily identified with alt text, headings, and textual descriptions). Searchers can then find your images and get to your site using Google Image Search.

One thing that can help your images be returned for results in Google Image search is opting in to enhanced image search in webmaster tools. This enables Google to use your images in the Google Image Labeler, which harnesses the power of the community for adding meta-data to your images.

Someone asked me, “What’s the maximum number of images per site that Google accepts for the Image Labeler.” There is no maximum or minimum, Google allows you to opt in no matter how many, or how few, images your site has. You too can practices good Search Engine Optimization for images and start ranking within Google Image Search!

SEO Question and Answers With Seth Godin This is a great interview, so I have added it to my Weekly SEO Q&A Pick

Seth Godin is the Founder & CEO Of Social Search Service Squidoo

Seth Godin is widely known as one of the foremost advocates of “permission marketing,” promotional campaigns that don’t rely on interrupting the attention of your customers, but rather engage them and even turn them into enthusiastic advocates that volunteer time and effort to help you promote your products or services.

This article is from Search Engine Land by Chris Sherman

More Information on Social Search Service Squidoo

What are the common words that vex our searchers? We applied our best spell checking skills to the data and came up with this list of the top 20 misspelled words in Search…

Everyone has certain words they struggle to spell correctly. Mine happens to be (unfortunitley) doh When it comes to spelling, we’re not perfect—you can count on us to occasionally botch recieve (sic), thier (sic), and relavant (sic).

The superb spellers at the Bee (Scripps National Spelling Bee) will rake in even more What’s Hot Today this year with the finals being televised in prime time on ABC. Searches on “spelling bee” have doubled over the last week and we’ve seen related search spikes on “national spelling bee,” “spelling words,” and “commonly misspelled words.”

1. Wallmart (Wal-Mart)
2. Rachel Ray (Rachael Ray)
3. Amtrack (Amtrak)
4. Hillary Duff (Hilary Duff)
5. Katherine McPhee (Katharine McPhee)
6. Britany Spears (Britney Spears)
7. Geneology (Genealogy)
8. Jaime Pressley (Jaime Pressly)
9. Volkswagon (Volkswagen)
10. Wikepedia (Wikipedia)
11. William Sonoma (Williams-Sonoma)
12. Tatoo (Tattoo)
13. Travelosity (Travelocity)
14. Elliot Yamin (Elliott Yamin)
15. Kiera Knightley (Keira Knightley)
16. Kelly Pickler (Kellie Pickler)
17. Brittney Spears (Britney Spears)
18. Avril Lavinge (Avril Lavigne)
19. Rianna (Rihanna)
20. Jordan Sparks (Jordin Sparks)

What words give you the most trouble? We’d love to know. Leave us a coment beelow... Sorry I can’t help myself. hehe

In its latest technological leap, Google will begin showing videos on its main results page along with photos, books and other content previously separated into different categories. Let me break it down for you… Google is basically combining all their search records (Search, News, Video and Images) on to one page. Which means they are saying they figured out how to identify the type of search-query entered and provide a single set of results that it is confident will include all the information you could possibly want.

The problem with that is now we (SEO Community) have to compete with all 5 results shoved onto one page that only has 10 spots! We will be forced to either stick with web search (4 or 5 spots) or figure out how to optimize content such as photos, videos and news items.

The other big news within the story is Google plans on showing Video ads on it result page!

Social Media Optimization (SMO) or Social Bookmarking is a new tool within the search engine optimization professional toolbox. Social Book Marking, is the term used for bookmarking sites on the web and sharing them with friends, peers and family members. Have you ever booked marked a site using your browser by adding it to your favorites? It’s that easy, but now you can share those bookmarks within a community of friends.

These are some popular social bookmarking site.
http://www.foxmarks.com
http://www.del.icio.us
http://www.digg.com
http://www.furl.net
http://www.myweb2.search.yahoo.com
http://www.simpy.com
http://www.blogmarks.net
http://www.feedmarker.com
http://www.lookmarks.com

Get more Social Media Links

Most of these Social Bookmarking services are free of charge. All you have to do is create a free account or install a browser plug-in at which point you can begin adding bookmarks to your account. The cool part is now you have the chance to share them with friends at the same time being able to access them from any browser window.

Let’s look at why social book-marking is so useful for SEO purposes?

Social bookmarking sites are “tag based”- which means you can “tag” them with keywords so your visitors that bookmark your site can find them easily later. Here comes the good part, the Search Engines actually index these tags at the same time the spider the link, which means you are getting a free one-way links from high-traffic sites. Remember your keywords are attached to them, so choosing the proper tag name is critical it plays a very important role in your book marking campaign
.
Not to mention it’s a great way to get your website customers/surfers working for you. In addition when a visitor bookmarks your site, the Social Bookmarking services checks the tag to see if the link already exists. One way to make the system work in your favor is to changing your bookmark tags. This way you can get multiple links with different tags on the same site. Pretty cool huh? Because these sites are regularly crawled by search engines, your site will most likely be crawled more often.

So get out that start playing with those social bookmarking services, its funs and easy!

Perhaps the whole sex video-as-path-to-stardom thing isn’t so bad after all. Well, there is the whole losing-of-dignity issue, but who needs dignity when you can reap publicity? Searches on socialite Kim Kardashian soared in February when a purloined sex tape made the rounds online and on DVD.

At the time, we figured she’d slip her lacy undergarments back on and slink off into obscurity. However, Kardashian has displayed startling staying power in Search thanks in part to gossip blogs. The wags of the Web have been fueled by the story of the fame-hungry gal and her flings.

Thanks to her infamy, the brunette stunner has set up shop in our top 2,000 search terms and her latest beau caused Buzz to boil over. Rumors of a relationship with Saints star running back Reggie Bush caused a 139% increase in Kardashian searches. Of course, related searches on Kim “pictures,” “video,” and “nude” all jumped in the wake of this tantalizing tidbit.

As for Bush, queries on the former Heisman winner leapt 78% and related lookups on “reggie bush dating,” “reggie bush girlfriend,” and “reggie bush photos” all made strides in Search.

What’s next for Kim? Blue skies and puppy dogs. Vivid Video reached a settlement with her and will stop distributing her sex tape at the end of May. And with the elusive Bush by her side, she’s ready to break out big in What’s Hot Today yet again.