Ok, so it’s probably not possible to own all 10 listings on the SERPs for your brand name, but you can certainly try.

First off, why should you care about having more than one result for your company name? From a branding point of view, it lends great credibility. Multiple results on various web properties conveys that you’re “out there” and actively engaged with your customers in many forms. From a public relations view, it’s a great way to potentially push negative press (customer complaints) off the first page.

By utilizing the hugely popular sites of the day, it’s not impossible to own at least 5 out of the 10 top spots on Google. Here’s my list for the top web properties you should have a presence on.

1. Your Website (duh!) - If you don’t yet rank for your own company or brand name, don’t read any further in this post. You’ll want to first focus on some basic SEO tactics.
   
2. LinkedIn - The most popular business professional networking site. Your profile page should rank highly for your brand name.
3. Press Release Sites - I’ve seen press releases ranking on the first page for years after their initial release. These provide an ongoing source of branding and traffic about previous newsworthy events. PRWeb.com will get you the best results.
   
4. YouTube - Post a short informational video about your company. Google loves YouTube content, so your video may instantly rank first page for your brand.
5. Facebook - Facebook now displays a limited public profile, so it can be indexed by search engines.
   
6. Myspace - Declining in light of Facebook, but still possesses great social networking capabilities. Make sure your profile page contains your brand name prominently.
7. Squidoo - Create a Squidoo hub for your brand and link it up with your RSS feed, YouTube videos, and Flickr images.
   
8. Hubpages - Similar to Squidoo and a Google favorite.
9. Wikipedia - Not every brand is worthy of Wikipedia entry, but it’s worth a try.
   
10. Technorati - Claiming your Technorati space should be the first step after creating a blog.
    

In addition to having a presence on the sites above, try using these tactics to create a Google indented listing.

Did I miss anything? Be sure to leave a comment. Hope everyone has a great Easter weekend.

Getting into the top 10 is only half the battle. How does your search result fare against the other SERP real estate? Here’s some simple tips I’ve gathered to help make your listing stand out.

1. Questions: Try using an intriguing question to spark the interest of the user. Questions leave people hanging, wanting to know more. If you ask the right question, your result will hopefully be clicked. RagePank offers some good thoughts on using questions in your title tag.
2. Keyword Dividers: If your title tag consists of several keywords, consider separating them by something more attention grabbing than commas. I frequently use double colons (::), the vertical bar( | ), or caret symbols ( >> ).
3. Short Titles: If you don’t care about stuffing as many keywords as possible into your title tag, consider shortening your title in order to make it stand out. Short titles are very scan-able
4. Company Name in Tag: The question about whether or not to include your company’s name in the title tag is a topic of much debate. If your brand name is well recognized, you could benefit from the additional trust implicit in the name. If not, you may simply be distracting from more important keywords and wasting valuable real estate.



5. Short URLs: Get Elastic shares some interesting data from Marketing Sherpa that suggests shorter URL’s increase click-through since they do not distract from the more important page title. While there may not be much you can do about the length of your domain (Palmerwebmarketing.com is an unfortunate 18 characters long), you may want to shorten your page files names.
6. Keyword in URL or Page File Names: This tactic is frequently used in Pay Per Click ads. By creating page file names with keywords in them, you make your listing appear more relevant. However, you may want to balance this tactic with the one above by not making unnecessarily long URL’s.
7. Indented Listings: Recently, I posted on creating indented search results. In addition to doubling your SERP real estate, and indented result creates a great visual marker that sets your listing apart.
8. Move higher: This seems like a no-brainer, but often we forget how much more clickable the number 1 spot is over number 2. Moving up a few results can have an exponential effect on your click-through rate.

Not every suggestion here will work for everyone. Be sure to test these tactics on less important pages, and then analyze the results. The key is to stand apart from your competition. If all top positions are using Questions in the title tag, you’re better off doing something else.

So you’ve got your listing in the top 5. Now what? How about doubling your real estate with an indented SERP result?

So what exactly is an indented result? According to Help Center, “When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it.”

So how to you get an indented Google result? Here’s 3 simple steps:

1. Identify 2nd Highest Ranking Page for your Keyphrase: Simply do a Google search for the keyword phrase you are seeking to obtain an indented result for. If you don’t have another page that ranks, or you don’t like the current page that comes up 2nd, create a new one.
2. Link from the 1st Ranking Page to the 2nd Ranking Page: Using your keyword phrase in the anchor text, link from the first page to the second page. Preferrably, use a contextual link within a body of text rather than a sitewide navigational link.
3. Begin Building Links to the 2nd Page: Depending on the competition for this keyword, you may only need a few good quality backlinks to create the indented result.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that indented results can be somewhat fickle. They are frequently here today, and gone tomorrow. However, with proper link building, you should be able to maintain the result.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Ethical SEO consulting and Local Search Engine Placement for small to medium size companies.

Well, it finally happened. The long awaited Google PageRank updated has sent shockwaves through the SEO community. Despite some of my client’s sites loosing a notch on the over-rated PR scale, I can careless. The results of the SEO campaigns I currently manage have never been better.

In this quick post, I’ll share what SEO tactics have been working for me in the last few months.

1. Focusing on niche keywords first, High volume keywords later
2. Creating multiple landing pages, each focusing on 3-4 keywords
3. I’ve nearly stopped SEO-ing home pages and focused on niche landing pages instead
4. Greatly diversify link anchor text
5. Focusing on Site-wide SEO including url and linking structure
6. Stopped wasting my time with Web directories (I still use blog directories, however)
7. Dropped all Reciprocal Links Pages. (according to Matt Cutts, linking to certain sites can actually decrease PageRank)

I suppose this post didn’t have much to do with the PageRank update. But I think that supports my point that PageRank is a poor SEO metric. 

Recently, Google Webmaster tools started allowing webmasters to disallow certain sitelinks (see picture below) from appear on your search results. While they still don’t allow you to control whether or not these sitelinks show up and for what search queries they are displayed for, it certainly is a step in the right direction.

So what exactly is a Google sitelink? According to Google:

“…Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents…”

While it’s certainly a welcome gesture, I would question whether or not it really “helps users navigate your site.” Upon checking the Sitelinks Google created for C28, a Christian clothing retailer that I do work for, I found links for the following pages:

1. The Links page (partners): This is probably the least important page on the site!
2. 2 Broken links to product category pages (for some reason Google decided to remove the parameters from query string that are supposed to follow the question mark (e.g. productlistings.asp?category1=guys&category2=shirts)
3. Link to the “Kids” clothing category: This is one of the least important product categories with virtually no outbound links pointing to it.
4. Locations Page: Good job Google, this truly is an important page
5. Events Page: Important page
6. About Us Page: Important page

Overall, 3 of the 8 sitelinks were pages that I myself would have included if I had the option.

So what’s the moral of this post? If you have sitelinks for your listing (I’ve noticed they only tend to show up when searching for the company or brand name) make sure they are relevant and work properly. If they don’t, login to Google Webmaster central and exclude them. However, as I write this, I have yet to see the pages I requested be excluded actually removed, and I put in the request 24 hours ago.

I know what you’re thinking. The rel=”nofollow” tag is only used when you link to external websites right? According to Wikipedia, the no follow tag is “ a relation tag (rel=”nofollow”) which can be added to any link and is technically a request from the website to search engines to ignore the link.” Basically, it stops the flow of the link juice, not passing any page rank.

Why would you want to use this on your site? Well, consider a typical e-commerce site. You’ve got your important pages like top level product categories, and lower level product detail pages. However, the navigation for most sites also includes links to “less important” pages such as your customer service page, return policy, and privacy policy. While these pages are technically still “important”, you don’t necessarily want them to receive the same link juice a category or product page receives, because they are rarely updated.

It’s important to keep in mind that although the Googlebot has the ability to crawl as deep as possible, it rarely will go 5, 6 or 7 levels deep. If it does, it’s a rare occasion and those pages likely don’t rank well.

What’s the solution? Slap the rel=”nofollow” tag on all links in your site navigation that don’t need to be crawled as frequently. If you do this, be sure to link somewhere to them without the nofollow, such as from your physical sitemap.

I believe this stategy can work wonders on getting your site’s pages out of the supplemental index. Be sure to leave a comment if you’ve successfully used this method before, or let me know your results after using it.

Update: Google no longer labels results with “Supplemental Result”. Nevertheless, the penalties still exist. 

“Supplemental Result” – the term no business wants to see next to their website on the search page. Unfortunately though, billions of sites reside in Google’s purgatory, doomed to receive only minimal traffic. Why does the supplemental index exist? How can a website get out of it? The following post will suggest 4 ways to get out of Google’s supplemental results.

Get Rid of Duplicate Content

90% of the time, a website is in the supplemental index because it contains content (usually text), that exists on many other websites. A few examples of this would be manufacturer product descriptions or syndicated content such as news or articles. How do you fix this? Simple, re-write content and make it original to your website.

How do you know if your content is duplicate? Try this duplicate content checker:

Cleanup Nasty, Complicated URLs

Many websites, especially sites that rely on database content, use query strings in the URLs. For example, http://www.url.com/ID=XXX&SOURCE=YYYY. Unfortunately, many search engine spiders don’t like crawling these pages. One reason is that engines consider each url as a unique page, even if it has the same content. So although the page http://www.url.com/ and http://www.url.com/id=123 may have the exact same content, you may incur a duplicate content penalty.

What’s the solution for this? Try to minimize using parameters if possible. While using them for external campaign tracking may be alright, definitely avoid them in the internal linking structure.

Many websites now are re-writing their ugly URL’s with re-writing software. This also has search engine optimization benefits as well. Software such as this is available for both Apache and Windows servers. For more info, checkout this Wikipedia article.

Build Deep Links

While links to the homepage are nice, targeted links to product detail pages within your site will ensure that pages don’t get orphaned and ignored by the spiders. If the crawler always starts at your homepage, it’s likely it will abandon the session before crawling your whole site. Deep linking to content gives spiders a new starting point to find fresh and relevant pages.

I’m amazed everytime I get one of the those phony invoices from search engines submission companies. Just today I got one for a domain I manage (nice to know my registrar keeps our information private). For only $65, they offer to submit my domain  to 25 search engines yearly. Wow, what a deal.

I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise to some, but search engines don’t need help finding your site. Back in the day (2-3 years ago that is), it was helpful to submit your site to ensure that it gets noticed by the spiders. However, with the power and complexity today of engines such as Google, it’s no longer necessary. The most effective way to get your site noticed is through backlinks. Rather than wasting time submitting,website owners should be creating links pointing to their pages. The SE’s much prefer finding a site on its own. While many of the major engines still have submission pages, the benefits of using them are likely slim to none. In my experience with clients, I’ve been able to get their site listed within 2-3 days by simply creating a few external links from other sites.

Excessively submitting to search engines looks like spam. Many of these shady paid services offer to re-submit your site at regular times intervals. While it’s not likely that a few submissions will get your site banned, overly submitting it will. Play it safe, and stay away from these services.

The moral of this post: If you are currently paying for Search Engine Submission, stop wasting your money! If you get one of those submittal offers in the mail, throw it in the trash.

Google’s love affair with links has forced many search marketers to focus most of their efforts on link building. However, many significant gains can still be made by properly executing on page SEO. Of course, gone are the days of meta tag stuffing or endless keyword repetition. But there still exist a few tactics that are extremely effective.

1. Title Tag: Still the single most important on page SEO variable. I’ve seen a single change to the title tag bring in thousands in monthly sales for clients. The key is to use relevant, rankable keywords.
2. H1 Tags: Second to the title tag, an H1 tag is the second most influential onsite variable. In the past, some web designers have disliked using it because it makes the font extremely large. However, with an external style sheet, you can use an H1 tag at with any font size you wish.
3. Contextual Linking: Linking to another page on your site from within the body of text is extremely powerful. Basically, you should create links on your site as if it were an external site. Create a network of pages all linking to each other by different means. Vary the anchor text to create diversity. Avoid keyword stuff links within navigation, as site wide links are very ineffective.
4. Original Content: Don’t expect your pages to rank if you are copying and pasting content from another site or syndicating content. The SE’s love original content.

On page SEO can still be very effective. Leave a comment if you have know any additional strategies that have worked for you.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Christian Internet Marketing and specializes in SEO for Church websites.

I’ve noticed a trend in the Google SERPs lately. Google seems to be
integrating their different vertical engines such as Image and Blog search, into
the normal search results. For certain search queries, you even see a few images
appear above the webpage results.

With this change in the way Google displays results, website owners must
place additional focus on optimizing for image results. By taking a quick look
at your log files or analytics software, you might be surprised to see you are
already getting decent traffic from image searches.

The following tips will get you started with optimizing the images that
appear on your site.

Alt Text: Probably the most significant factor in ranking for an image
search is the contents of the image alt property. Basically, the alt text should
contain a brief description of the item as if you were explaining it to a blind
person. After all, the original intention of this property for the vision
impaired.

Surrounding Text: Google will weigh the surrounding text heavily when
in determining what the picture is about. Be sure to place relevant keywords
above and below the image you are optimizing.

Image File Name: Another important factor is whether or not keywords
are in the image file name. For example, if you were trying to optimize for the
word “Christian t-shirt“, you might name the image christian-t-shirt.jpg. Of course, it
always difficult to optimize this way if you are forced to go back and change
the name of existing images. Keep keywords in mind when you are naming them in
the first place.

Anchor Text: Although it’s somewhat uncommon to link directly to an
image that’s not in a web page, you can greatly increase your ranking by using
relevant anchor text in the hyperlink just as if you were optimizing for a
webpage.

As people’s search preferences become more sophisticated, the popularity of
vertical search engines will grow. In addition, Google and other SE’s will
likely continue to mix results from various types of content.

Please leave a comment if you’ve used any other tactic for image SEO or have successfully used any of the above.