The DigiBuzz Blog

What Universal Search means to your search engine ranking on Google.

What is Google universal search, and how will it impact your company’s search engine optimization efforts?

Universal search is the seamless integration of results from Google’s various vertical search engines (news, video, images, local and book) into the organic Web SERPs (search engine result pages).

Google has been incorporating results from its vertical search engines into its main Web results for a while now. Earlier, however, the results from, say, news search were clearly differentiated and published at the top of the organic results. Where Universal Search differs is that these results are now seamlessly integrated into the Web results based on their importance to a user’s query.

For instance, check the results for Apple iPod, and notice how results from news and Click to Read More

In a significant report, titled Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, MarketingSherpa reported that online press releases, combined with organic search engine optimization, are one of the most effective Internet marketing strategies. As Jack Trout and Al Ries, best-selling authors, wrote: “PR plants the seed. Search marketing harvests the crop.”
Advertising clutter and information saturation have made traditional media less appealing to consumers, who prefer to consume news when they want it and where they want it. Not surprisingly, more and more savvy users are turning to the Internet for their daily quota of news. About 75% of searchers and researchers get their news online today.
Remember, it’s not just your prospects, but even journalists are increasingly using news search engines.
= 98% of journalists go online daily
= = 92% for article Click to Read More

Some use the straight, narrow, and often, difficult path to achieve success. Many use short-cuts. As in life, there are no short-cuts to long-term success in search engine optimization (SEO).

Search engine optimization is the process of ensuring that a website gets visibility and ranking on search engines through a series of strategies based on globally-accepted best practices. Or rather it should be.

However, a number of SEO firms around the world use tactics that are not only unethical but specifically banned by search engines. If your website requires SEO services, it pays to keep yourself informed about what is ethical and what is not. If your SEO service partner follows Black Hat Tactics, it can have serious consequences for your site in the long run. Of course, such SEO firms may show dramatic results and ROI initially, but the moment search engines catch on – Click to Read More

Till a year ago, the only way you could get your site indexed on Google is by waiting for Googlebot (the software program or spider that Google uses to crawl the Web) to visit your site.

While Googlebot does a fairly comprehensive job of covering the Web, webmasters needed more control over how their site was indexed by the search engine.

In 2005, Google introduced Sitemaps.

Here’s what Google has to say about its Sitemaps: “Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as “spiders” to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content.

“Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to Click to Read More

The Internet is the retail industry’s biggest new frontier. Online retail sales are expected to touch $329 billion by 2010, according to Forrester Research. That is a huge market by any yardstick. But any online retailer hoping to get a slice of that big pie will face one major hurdle on the path to customer acquisition: making their dynamic, database-driven sites search engine friendly.

It’s a no-brainer that search engines such as Google drive a majority of the traffic to web sites. And if online retailers want to attract huge volumes of prospects to their sites, they must have a strong SEO/SEM strategy.

That’s easier said than done. Shopping sites are by nature dynamic and database-driven. That’s the only way they can remain user-friendly. A shopper visits a site, chooses a few parameters and variables and is shown a page of products that match his or her Click to Read More

In the dense undergrowth of the Web, search engine marketing and optimization are far more effective and economical at drawing attention to your website and products than any other online marketing tool. Traditionally, most marketers have used SEO as a direct response mechanism to generate leads.

That may fast be changing. SEO and SEM, if used effectively, can be powerful brand-building tools as well.

Building brand recall through SEO

It’s clear that a vast majority of potential buyers of goods and services, search for relevant websites through search engines; and that searching is one of the most popular activities online. It’s also well known that most searchers don’t look beyond the first few result - pages. Now, let’s say, your company is the leader in the space that you operate in. If you don’t have a good SEO strategy, regardless Click to Read More

Search engine advertising works on the simple principle of supply and demand. The highest bidder gets top billing for keywords he has chosen. And the most sought after keywords will be the most expensive.

Not surprisingly, the cost of high-traffic and high-conversion keywords is constantly rising. But is bidding for the most popular keywords the only way to get traffic and increase ROI?

It certainly is not. More and more people are increasingly buying into the long tail concept. So what exactly is the long tail of search engine advertising? Let’s illustrate with an example.

Let’s say you sell digital cameras and accessories online. You want to run a search engine advertising campaign. To begin with, let’s consider the keyword ‘camera’. It’s a very popular keyword and costs Rs 100 per click and delivers 100 clicks per day. Your cost works out to Rs Click to Read More