The Future of Search Real-time

And we all thought that things were going too fast when the Internet Revolution started, well we’re about to get even faster! Real-time search brings some good and some bad. The good is instant communication, and the bad is how factual is what you are digesting? Is it fact or fiction? To me this is the one thing that will set apart a trustworthy brand as opposed to a failing brand. I don’t want hearsay or gossip I want the truth, and I can handle the truth! While social media is instrumental in bringing about real-time search, it will go beyond social media. Real-time will become the standard and with that we will watch new brands sprout up.

Real-time search enables you to discover breaking news at the moment that it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. As an example, a while back on Google’s big story was about GM's stabilizing car sales, which showed under "News results" in the SERPS. Nonetheless, thanks to their powerful real-time algorithms, the "Latest results" feature surfaces another important story breaking just seconds before: GM's CEO stepped down. This is the future and it’s all about real-time!

Take a look at our real-time search application and see for yourself what real-time search is bringing you today. If you know about something that we have missed or if you know of other real-time search engines please let us know what we’ve missed.

Clean Uncluttered Website Design

When starting to consider your website design start with a design that is clean, uncluttered and has a useful navigation system. A website that is clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate are much more appealing to the end user, the web visitor. The look and feel of your website should have a natural flow to it along with a concise appearance that makes it easy to figure out what to do and where to go. If it's complicated then odds are that visitor will go somewhere else. They have found you because you offer what they need so now it's your websites job to give them just that. Not only is a clean, uncluttered website design good for the end user, the visitor but it is equally as good for the search engine spider bots. It is more likely that search engines will visit all of the pages of your website if it follows simple and conventional design standards.

Colors are Important in Good Website Design

The color palette that is used to create your website should be one that is easily coordinated and easy on the eyes. It is extremely important that the color combinations used on your website are not bright neon colors that tend to be harsh on the eyes. Colors are so important that the wrong colors used are also enough for your web visitor to leave your site. Even if your web site had the greatest content out there the misuse of colors could determine whether a visitor was interested or not. So the lesson learned is to make sure not to use unattractive colors!

Use Hex Codes in Search Optimizing Your Website

Your website needs aesthetic appeal in order for your website to have an impact on your search engine optimization (SEO). If you create a website that is not appealing to others, it is likely to not be popular either. Since the colors used on your website can contribute to the appeal of your website, you want to make sure that you code your web pages accordingly. Different Internet browsers may display colors differently. One way to avoid this problem is to use hex codes to define those colors used on your website. Hex codes are incorporated into the HTML code of your web pages and you should define hex code so these colors are viewed universally in all browsers. 
 
You’re Website for Optimization

Your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy related to website design includes ensuring your web design reflects the purpose of your website. If you are selling a particular widget line, visitors to your website should realize what you are selling immediately. If you are promoting a service, your website should clearly indicate the services you offer. A Clear website design and structure can make your website more appealing to visitors, which will also make it more important to search engines, as we stated earlier.

Use Flash Sparingly in Optimizing Your Website since this is a Closed Application

If search optimization is important to your website design then it is extremely important that you do not develop your website using Flash technology. Flash can be an attention grabbing technology because of all of the bells and whistles that it offers, but too much Flash can be difficult to navigate and a little overwhelming to visitors. Also, not all website visitors can view Flash websites, granted the majority can but the search engines don't know what's in that file. If you create web pages with Flash portions then the search engines may still be able to crawl the Flash portions of your website but you risk losing valuable traffic by incorporating too much flash into your website design.

Conversions, Conversions, Conversions!

 If you have taken the time to optimize your website with your industry buzz phrases and you don’t notice any difference in your business then maybe you’ve chosen the wrong buzz phrases. All of that SEO work doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t help your business convert.

You have to make sure that you have a good web site analytical tool installed so you can track where your customers come from. If you had a hundred visitors to your web page widget and you sold 1 widget then your conversion rate is 1%. So now that you know what your conversion rate is now you can move forward to the next step and that is to increase you conversions.

So how do you get more visitors to your site and how do you get more conversions?

Make sure the widget page is well optimized for that particular widget and make sure that it is the landing page when searched.

If you have a high bounce rate then you have to break it down and figure out way, because that’s not good seo. Make sure you have a strong call to action and good document structure so it is easy to navigate and figure out.

In the end your log files will tell you a lot, take the time to understand them and to make the proper adjustments.

Keyword research is the most important part of selecting the proper keywords and keyphrases for your website. You want to ensure that the keywords and keyphrases that you use are relevant to your site and that they are actually searched for on a daily basis. If no one searches for them then what good are they? KeywordIndex is unique because it uses it’s own database, not a shared database.

KeywordIndex offers a white paper at: http://www.keywordindex.com/ki-good-keywords-more-sales.htm on how to select the proper keywords for your website. You will find some valuable information in KeywordIndex free whitepaper, which will include things like:

Improve your business with better keywords
Find the financial value of your keywords
Choose the right keyword type
Understand why single words don‘t work
How to use KeywordIndex to find the best keywords

Visit KeywordIndex at KeywordIndex.com

To get higher rankings on Google you need to be better than your competition. Search for your main keywords or keyphrases on Google and visit the websites of your competitors.

Once on the websites check their anchor text, see how many sites link to your competitors using your keywords or keyphrases. You want your website to have more inbound links using your keywords or keyphrases than they have. If you find that they have more inbound links using your keywords or keyphrases, then find high PR sites that will link into you with your keywords or keyphrases.

Ideally you want your content to be good enough so that they will link to you on their own, but first they have to know that you exist. By contacting them you will now be providing them with a new resource. See you at the TOP!

If you ever find that your website rankings drop in Google here are the things that you want to determine. First determine if they have dropped or if they are gone altogether.  If your rankings dropped or if you have been removed you will want to research why this occurred. Here are some things to check:

Have you recently made changes to your web pages? If so Google downranks pages after changes sometimes but the rankings will most likely come back.

Your competition may have improved their pages and popularity and they are now better than yours. If this is the case you will need to better optimize your website and look at your inbound links.

You may have what Google considers to be spam elements on your web pages and they may have removed you or penalized you by dropping your rank. You will need to research this and make the appropriate changes. Once you fix these problems you can email Google and ask them for reinclusion.

Feel free to contact Hieroweb Interactive and we can determine why your rankings have changed. Or call us at 805-582-2081

Does Google use the bounce rate of a webpage in their algorithm?  If so what does this mean to your website and can you improve your bounce rate?

The bounce rate of your website is what that see only one page of your website and the percentage of visitors who spend a small period of time on your website. What this does is help figure out the quality of the traffic that your site receives.

Google Analytics documentation defines the bounce rate as such:

"Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors."

Google can determine the bounce rate via their toolbar and their analytics. As is typical with Google’s algorithm we don’t know how big of a role the bounce rate plays.  But Google views a high bounce rate as a sign that the viewer is visiting a low quality page, which tells Google that what the user was looking for is not what they found.  So what you need to do is improved the contents and the usability of your web pages, and thus you might lower your bounce rate.

 It's easy to have negative results using AdWords if you're not careful and don't have a solid understanding on how Google AdWords works. If you find that you're not getting the results you thought you would then it's time to check your landing pages and the keywords associated with those landing pages. Good keywords and landing pages will result in good conversions. So the phrases that you're targeting most importantly need to be where you take them with your landing pages. Once on your landing page you must present the user with a clear call-to-action. That call-to-action needs to be enticing and must make they want to continue. Since Google uses a Quality Score when deciding the frequency that an ad shows up and the position of the ad. It’s important that the keyphrases used in your ad are also targeted on your landing page. If that landing page also does well in the natural search engine results then it will also have a good Quality Score.

 How to achieve a good Quality Score on Google's search network. The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it's calculating minimum bid or ad position:

Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors.

Quality Score for ad position is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors.

Cloaking is using a website optimization technique whereby a different web page is shown to the search engine than the actual web surfer. By knowing the search engine’s web bots different IP addresses one can serve up pages specifically for the search engines. Cloaking is a violation of the search engine guidelines. If and when you get caught your site will be removed from the search engines. Some companies that offer cloaking state that their service is undetectable; the search engines state that this is a false claim.  If your website is of value to you then DON"T use unethical means to do well in the search engines. White Hat practices will prevail.