Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd (Agog Digital) was awarded as the No.1 Hong Kong search engine optimization (SEO) company in March 2011 by an independent search authority, Topseos.

Agog Digital is really pleased with the achievement, especially as Agog Digital insists in using white-hat SEO techniques only. “In Hong Kong, many SEO service providers adopt search engine spamming techniques commonly referred to as black-hat techniques. It can gain a quick-fix result but may risk clients’ websites’ long-term presence in search engines,” Mr. Jimsun Lui, Senior Project Manager of Agog Digital said.

“When SEO is done properly, it can help clients’ websites to get found by hundreds or even thousands of keyword phrases free and without paying the expensive pay-per-click search advertising fee to search engines. However, search engine ranking algorithm is complex and evolving, and it requires in-depth knowledge and hand-on experience to optimize a website and gain maximum search engine visibility,” Jimsun further elaborated.

Topseos compiles the monthly list of leading Internet marketing firms after a rigorous evaluation criteria that includes:
- Competitive advantage
- Superior services and pricing
- Customer and technical support
- Response to client problems
- Innovations that set it apart from the competition
- Overall efficiency
- Overall performance

“The whole industry looks to us to identify reliable and accurate benchmarks and Agog Digital Marketing Strategy has proven by its performance that they deserve to be awarded,” shared Jeev Trika, partner at topseos.

For more information about Agog Digital, visit http://www.agogdigital.com or http://seo.agogdigital.com

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The search marketing team of Yahoo! says that firms need to upgrade their search engine optimization (SEO) campaign to make sure they get better return investments.

In the search engine’s blog, marketers were advised to do proper keyword selections, saying that this area is important especially when a company starts using professional SEO services.

Depending on the goal of an SEO campaign, sites will need to focus on high-volume search terms or product-specific phrases.

It is also important for an SEO campaign to respond to consumer behavior.

The Yahoo! marketing team explained: “Users are more sophisticated in their searches now, and we’ve seen that up to 20 per cent of searches in any given month can be search queries never seen before by a search engine.”

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in the 21st century business ecosystem, there are three powerful players that can either help new customers connect and find you, or ensure that you’ll lose market share to your competitors. They are Google, Yahoo, and Bing, the most-frequently-used search engines in the United States. (About 65 percent of Internet users start their searches at Google.com, according to the measurement firm comScore.)

Showing up prominently in their search results has become an important part of basic sales and marketing strategy for businesses – but one that isn’t well understood.

“Lots of companies invest in building a great website, but they don’t pay attention to the factors that drive you up in a search engine’s rankings,’’ says Jeff Demers, director of search marketing at Wakefly Inc., a consulting firm in Westborough. Demers says that about 50 percent of Google users will click on the first site that shows up in the search results.

There’s a whole community of consultants in the Boston area that peddle advice about how a business can improve its position on various search engines. The field is typically called “search engine optimization,’’ or SEO. (“Search engine marketing’’ is what businesses do when they buy ads on sites like Google, to be guaranteed that they will show up when a user types a particular search term. SEO doesn’t involve paying for ads.)

Last week, I asked a handful of local SEO experts for their best advice on how a business can raise its profile on sites like Google – and whether it’s necessary to hire a consulting firm to help you. Here’s what they said:

Valid links. Getting other sites to link to yours is a surefire way to raise your ranking on Google and other search engines. But you can’t buy links, explains Dharmesh Shah, cofounder of the Cambridge marketing software firm HubSpot Inc. “Hiring a firm to get a massive number of links is a bad idea,’’ he writes via e-mail. “What many of these firms do . . . is leave comment spam on blogs (with a back link), submit to worthless directories, put links on their own low-quality websites, and any number of other tactics.’’ When Google sees that lots of sites with low credibility are linking to you all of a sudden, it tends to lower your ranking rather than raising it. Far better are links from well-read blogs and media sites.

Fresh and useful content. So how do you get those sites linking to you? “If you create content that is helpful, people will link to it,’’ says Akshay Vazirani, the founder of Boston-based Dreaming Code Inc. If you’re a veterinarian, it may be occasional reviews of new kinds of pet food and treats; a realtor might start a blog collecting advice for people preparing to put their house on the market. “You do have to think more like a publisher or a media company, as opposed to just building your site and then letting it sit there,’’ says Steve Skroce, the SEO manager at the Boston office of Media Contacts, an interactive agency.

(more…)

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A heretofore-unknown search engine optimization (SEO) practitioner named Clinton Cimring is the latest to file an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to copyright the term “SEO.”

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land reports that “this is the second time in about two years that someone with no general stature, reputation or well-known and documented history has tried to claim a trademark on SEO. In 2008, Jason Gambert gained attention in trying to trademark the term.”

The HuoMah search blog reports that a biography of Cimring on his website seems to suggest that Cimring invented the practice of search engine optimization (SEO) at the age of 12, given the dates provided. The search blog also writes that additional documents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office indicate that Cimring is trying to copyright the term as “strategically elevating optimization” and not search engine optimization (SEO).

Cimring also disputes Gambert’s earlier claim, saying that he – Cimring – used the term as long ago as 1996, compared to Gamber’s claim of 2007.

Personally, I think he cannot succeed to gain copyright of the term “SEO”.  However, his action can make him famous!

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Webmasters perform search engine optimization (SEO) and want to get high search engine ranking in Google because it is the most popular search engine in the world. However, you must aware that Google is very strict in fighting against unethical manipulation of search engine ranking.

To  optimize for top Google ranking, your SEO effort must alert the following:

Basic Google Optimization Principle

SEO means to make your website appealing to visitors and search engines through proper practices, and your Google optimization effort must not involve tricks to manipulate search engine ranking.

Website Structure and Content Development

1. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. The key point is a clear hierarchy, and reachable from static text link.
2. Offer a site map. It is a very important SEO element for Google to index your web pages and assign appropriate search engine popularity scores (link popularity) to your web pages. It is particularly useful for large websites.
3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content with words users would type to find your pages . Google clearly states that they love information-rich website. So, SEO should emphasize on content development, and not SEO tricks. Of course, it is important to optimize webpage content.
4. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you use images, make sure you provide descriptive and accurate ALT tags.

Avoiding SEO Spam

The fundamental works for SEO or Google optimization is to ensure only search engine acceptable practices are used, that is, make pages for users, not for search engines.

If you or your SEO company implements unacceptable SEO practices or tricks, your website can be banned and removed from search engine index. This is especially true for Google. From experience, they are very determined to fight against search engine spam.

Therefore, you must alert that your optimization efforts do not commit in unacceptable SEO practices listed below:

1. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.” Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines , for example, showing different content to search engines than to users, or present HTML version to search engines and present Flash pages to users . Serving up different results based on user agent can be perceived as cloaking.

2. Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.

Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including but not limited to the following “black-hat” SEO techniques : white text on white background, use of CSS display:none or display: hidden to hide text, including text behind an image via DIV tag or layering techniques, small font size such as setting font size to 0. Some SEO companies believe that Google cannot detect spam if CSS tricks are used. Unfortunately, this is wrong.

Links can be hidden including but not limited to the following “black-hat” SEO techniques: link consists of hidden text, use of CSS to make tiny hyperlink such as text with one pixel high, link hidden in a small character such as hyperlink a hyphen in middle of a web page.

3. “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Excessive keywords in a meaningful web page can be perceived as keyword stuffing. Proper SEO must take care of this element.

4. Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, Google will choose one of them to list.

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, Google also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. Google implies that your website or whole network of websites can be penalized with low search engine rankings or removed from their index. Are you willing to take this risks and continue to build shadow websites?

For some reasons, if you cannot avoid duplicate content, Google suggests you can make use of robots.txt file to avoid Google indexing duplicated web pages or websites.

Alternatively, you can re-think of consolidate duplicated pages into 1 or expand each page to contain unique content.

Conclusion

SEO is not meaning of applying tricks to manipulate search engine ranking. SEO is about making a website search engine friendly and trustworthy, and building reputation to your website. To be search engine friendly and trustworthy, you must avoid unacceptable search engine optimization practices described above. If your SEO service provider is committing to those practices, stop to use them now and remove all spammy elements before your site get banned.

Information is provided by Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd, a SEO service provider.

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Notes: Is this a new trend for search?  If this is a trend,  search engine optimization firms have lots of thought.  Do search engine optimization firms need to get their clients listed in those vertical portals?  and different clients should get listed in different vertical portals?  How search engine optimization firms ensure clients with local focus get top rankings?  Please read on.

We’ve noted before how the Seattle area — for whatever reason — has become a hotbed of innovation when it comes to finding recipes on the Internet. And now one of the region’s tech giants is entering the virtual kitchen, looking to help consumers cook up everything from chili to cheese tortellini.

The Microsoft search engine Bing unveiled a new way for people to search for recipes, pulling those creations and more from sites such as MyRecipes.com and Microsoft’s own Delish.com. The search results include photos, ratings and nutritional information. They also allow cooks to search recipes by season or special occasion, allowing someone to find green chili cornbread stuffing for Thanksgiving or a deep dish apple pie for Fourth of July. If someone actually wants to locate the instructions to make a specific dish, they must click through to the partner Web sites.

The move is yet another example of how Microsoft is looking to segment search results by trying to go deeper than Google in certain niche categories. (Travel and shopping are two other examples).

I asked Steve Murch — a former Microsoft marketing executive and current CEO of online recipe site BigOven.com — for his take on the move. BigOven’s 170,000 recipes are not yet indexed in Bing, though Murch said he’d welcome the opportunity to distribute his recipes through the search engine.

“It’s great that Bing is focusing additional resources on helping cooks find great recipes faster and in a more consistent manner,” said Murch. “It’s one of many examples of various key verticals in search getting more structured over time.”

Of course, having so much recipe information residing in Bing could prevent cooks from clicking through to the partner recipe sites.That means a cook could spend more time perusing Bing than say AllRecipes or other recipe sites.

“While that trend will adjust the economics a bit for those companies that rely exclusively on advertising revenue, those that have structured data and productivity, publishing and grocery list tools like BigOven.com end up with a great vehicle for awareness and search engine optimization,” he said.

That’s good news for companies like BigOven, which last November became the first major cooking site to open the vault on its recipe database to outside developers. But Murch also noted that the move could challenge food writers and old media content producers.

“Over time, it’s our belief that those who take a more platform-based approach, that have the most comprehensive data, let users put data into the platform and then fetch it from anywhere and manage it using complementary productivity tools, generally stand to benefit as the search engines continue to structure their search,” he said.

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Microsoft and Apple are reportedly discussing the possibility of changing the iPhone’s default search engine from Google to Bing, which experts say could be a significant change in the fast-growing mobile search marketplace.

BusinessWeek quotes anonymous sources as saying that “talks have been under way for weeks,” and that Microsoft was a “pawn” in the deepening feud between Apple and Google. The competition has been growing fiercer since Google began competing with Apple in the mobile market with its Android OS and Nexus One smartphone.

Additionally, BusinessWeek says that Google is in danger of suffering financial losses if the rumored move to Bing is made, since AdMob reports that most mobile advertising in the U.S. is viewed on iPhones and iPod Touches. The iPhone is the most popular smartphone in the U.S., so any changes to its default programming are likely to produce measurable shifts in mobile search figures, according to analysts.

So, is there any new opportunities for mobile search engine optimization (SEO)?  I think search engine optimizer and SEO company should think about this especially if their clients want to get exposure in mobile phones.

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To deliver useful search returns from the so-called real-time Web–such as seconds-old Twitter “tweets” reporting traffic jams–Google has adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithmic tricks and filters to keep returns relevant, according to a leading Google engineer.

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Over at MIT’s Technology Review, they have the goods on how Google ranks tweets. Ok, like your regular old organic results, they didn’t learn the secret sauce. But they did get some good info on how you can optimize your Twitter account so your Tweets have a better chance of appearing in real-time search results.

Reputation is key. Who follows you determines reputation. If your followers have a lot of followers, that gives more authority to your tweets.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, [Google Fellow] Amit Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

But Singhal also told Technology Review it’s not a popularity contest. They also have to weed out the noise. Hashtags make that task difficult. And sorting through trending topics when so many people are Tweeting is a challenge, too.

Singhal pointed out that Twitter the only source of real-time information for Google. Sources such as blogs and news are also relevant and being weaved into the real-time search experience.

Takeaways:

1. Cultivate your following on Twitter.
2. Don’t overdo the hashtag.
3. Be comprehensive in your real-time efforts. Don’t just focus on Twitter.

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