We had a great time attending the AirHogs game last night. A small way of saying thanks to the hard working staff of The Info Group. Shout out to infielder Cody Merrell for giving the Mattiza boys autographed baseballs and to Fighter Pilot Ace Bacon for stopping by and giving hugs and fist pumps to everyone. To the gang at The Info Group I say, JOB WELL DONE and thanks for the dedication and enthusiasm you bring everyday.

If your company is located in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex and looking for a very family-friendly and affordable company outing I can’t recommend attending a Grand Prairie AirHogs game highly enough.
I’m not making a commission for this endorsement but give J Willms a shout for your event.

If you’ve not set your robots.txt file to exclude your image folder then you are probably receiving as much if not more traffic from Google images as you are from Google search. Why? Well Google reports that 15% of all queries made are conducted via their image search facility. So it’s possible to receive tremendous traffic from image search and in fact we’ve had clients who have come to us for SEO that are receiving more traffic via image search than content search.

So is the answer to exclude your images folder from being spidered? It could be but you can also take advantage of brand awareness and what we’ll call contact visits (visitors who start with an image search but will explore a site further upon landing from that image search). Brand awareness? Yes, with properly optimized images and rich media you can control how the image/rich media is displayed in the SERPs. Using relevant keywords in the file name and in the properties summary can have a dramatic impact on how your image or rich media file is displayed.

This same practice applies to pdf’s, word docs and almost any file you can place online. Taking the time to optimize your properties summary tab or file properties is a great way to increase brand awareness online.

With 2/3 of the search market Google certainly has acquired enough user data to understand trends, patterns and the like and it appears now that Google is using that data to focus ads based on queries. This story by Saul Hansell of The New York Times describes some interesting findings in Google search results as of late.

Apparently Google is using visitor search queries to push relevant ads. The example given in the story is a visitor who might search for diving and then do another search for vacation would be shown ads for diving trips. So what’s different than the diving company who has ads displaying via Adwords? This shows that Google is displaying ads based on behaviour not what keywords were purchased. Now that is focused.

Of course privacy concerns abound and we’ve yet to see how that will play out but if that issue can be safely bedded advertising will take a step forward.

In the past 18 months the volume of chatter regarding mobile search has grown into a low rumble and all indications are it will swell to a roar in the next few years. While the number of mobile surfers is not at a level comparable to pc based surfers it is growing and doing so at an alarming rate. So much so that Google mobile product manager Matt Waddell called it a watershed moment in a recent interview.

What does this mean to you?

Quite simply if you do not have a mobile version of your website in operation or on the drawing board you will get left behind. Mobile phones have now reached 75% penetration in the U.S. and 4 of 5 mobile phone users now request some sort of internet access when purchasing their phone. These kind of numbers combined with the increased energy from search engines to provide mobile friendly results (both in look and relevance, meaning why deliver search results that don’t look good and then send a mobile user a search result to a website that is not mobile friendly?) it does not take a rocket scientist to understand mobile search will impact the way people conduct business.

So the priorities of the business owner should now include a properly built mobile website to compliment their “pc” site and a presence in mobile search. Both of these tasks can be completed by The Info Group.

It’s not a surprise that Google made gains in every metric of the report released by Efficient Frontier or that it is still the dominate search engine when it comes to volume of searches but it is a nice surprise to read how healthy search engine marketing is despite the downturn of the economy. Read the press release or download the report.

Going green is the way of today and a search engine in Austrailia is trying to make searching a green affair. Launched in 14 countries, Ecocho promises to plant trees according to the number of searches made through it. Using Yahoo & Google search engines visitors have an opportunity to impact the environment. For every thousand searches via Yahoo up to two trees will be planted, searches via Google will deliver only half as many plantings.

The effort is funded through advertising revenue from the search giants.

So search today and help plant a tree!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a conversation with a webmaster or marketing person that ultimately I’m challenged on what it takes to implement a successful SEO campaign. Many times it starts with, “you just add a bunch of keywords to your meta tags and content” or “you just create a page for each keyword” or some other riduclous statement. As easy as it would be to just laugh or tell them good luck and walk out I seem to find myself instead taking the time to explain why their theories won’t work and really what the best path to take is.

With that in mind let’s take a very quick look at the very basics of good search engine optimization.

1. Keyword research - Take the time to find the keywords that are the most targeted for your website. Generic keywords are the first thing most people think they need for their site but the reality is most people don’t search for one word terms when they are motivated to take action.
2. Title tags - These are the most important of all of the tags. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, make sure you have a unique title tag for every page.
3. Meta tags - THe KEYWORD TAG IS NOT THAT IMPORTANT! In fact if you want to use the keyword tag place misspellings, zip codes, etc, in it. Your description tag is the second most important tag you can use. Use a unique description tag on each page.
4. Content - Content is King has been a mantra since I’ve been involved with SEO (circa 1997). Create content that is readable by a human using your keyword phrases naturally. If you try to create content for the search engines you will fail.
5. Internal linking - Make sure you have text links to every page in your site and that you link to pages within the content on your site. Hint, Click Here is not the best way to use a text link, think keyword phrase.
6. Code - Make sure your html and code is compliant and when possible reference your code instead of hard-coding it to your page.
7. Link popularity - Gain as many relevant links as you can because just like content, Links are King. Submit to web directories, create social profiles and update them regularly, write articles and submit them, issue press releases, create content that is compelling enough other websites will want to reference it, join forums and add your link in your signature, and post, post, post, be creative and above all … gain links.
8. Sitemaps - Create a user friendly html sitemap and at a minimum link to it from your front page. Create a xml sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo’s Site Explorer and MSN Webmaster Central.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? Well then give it a try and soon you’ll find it’s not rocket science but it is hard work and just like anything else you won’t be successful without hard work.

As competitive as the search engine market is, Google, Yahoo & MSN find common ground as they work to improve search results by allowing Cross-host submission of sitemaps. Read the post on Yahoo’s Search Blog.

We’re happy to announce David James Foods has chosen The Info Group to implement a search engine optimization campaign. DavidJamesFoods.com offers complete catering services for business, weddings, parties and guarantee their “Grill On-Site” parties will bring a “sizzle” to your event.

David James Catering & Foods Co. is located in the Dallas / Ft Worth metro-plex and brings over 20 years of experience in the food service industry.

William Steinberg Consultants Inc (www.notjustsurveys.com), a survey software company based in Canada, has partnered with The Info Group to improve their organic rankings.

William Steinberg Consultants Inc. produces the market leading survey software products: Survey Tools for Windows, the Survey Genie and the Survey Genie Gold. The company, which was established in 1988 by Dr. William Steinberg, also carries the most extensive collection of top quality HR software on the web.