In September we announced that we were working to bring Google Instant to mobile, and today we’re making a beta version available to most iPhone and Android devices in the U.S. To try it out, go to google.com in your phone’s browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box (if you don’t see the “Turn on” link, try waiting a moment and then refresh the page).

Like the desktop version of Google Instant, when you type on your mobile device you’ll see predictions of what you might be searching for. If you type [anse], for example, you should see [ansel adams] along with other predictions. Results for the first prediction appear automatically, and tapping on the other predictions will display those results. Pressing the enter key or the search button skips the predictions and will display results for exactly what you’ve typed. Check out our demo video:

With Google Instant on mobile, we’re pushing the limits of mobile browsers and wireless networks. You will probably notice a big improvement in speed when you search thanks to a new AJAX and HTML5 implementation for mobile that dynamically updates the page with new results and eliminates the need to load a new page for each query.

Google Instant for mobile works best on 3G and WiFi networks, but since the quality of any wireless connection can fluctuate, we’ve made it easy to enable or disable Google Instant without ever leaving the page. Just tap the “Turn on” or “Turn off” link.

We hope you’ll enjoy using Google Instant for mobile as much as we enjoyed making it. It’s currently available for Android 2.2 (“Froyo”) devices and iPhones and iPods running iOS 4 in the U.S. in English. We’re working to support additional countries and languages and more devices in the coming months, so stay tuned. Source

If you are keen to leverage on the latest Google developments to reach your Target Audience in Mobile Search and the above sounds complicated and difficult to apprehend? Do not worry. We are the experts, so that you do not have to be one. Contact AdVantage SEO at +65 9450 0295 / +65 6640 9987 or email info@advantageseo.net and we would provide you with a solution!

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2. Ford Turning Cars Into Mobile Wi-Fi Hotspots
3. eBay Declared ‘09 Mobile Retailer Of The Year

Is ranking well for local search results important to your business? If yes, read on.

This week Google introduced Place Search, a new kind of search result that organizes the  information around local places. Whether you’re looking for a restaurant, dry clean or tuition centre, you’ll find what you’re looking for more quickly and easily.

Google Place Search

They had clustered search results around specific locations so you can make comparisons and choose the best sites. Many a times, the address and telephone number maybe listed, which allows you to quickly pick up your phone to make the enquiry. You should already be seeing place results automatically for many local searches. If you don’t see Place Search results at first, you can always click Places in the left-hand panel of the results page.

Place Search had been around for awhile on beta. Now they had moved the Map to the right and in fact, the map moves with you as you scroll down the page.

How would this change affect SEO and PPC(SEM)?

For SEO, if your site used to be listed in the Top 10, you would had been pushed further down. In some cases, there can be up to 7 Places Page listings and the organic listings is been reduced to 7 only. If your site had always been at 8-10 position, you could potentially be pushed to the second page.

For PPC, with the Map been moved to the right, it pushes the “Sponsored Links” in the right panel further down by about 4 listings. Worst still, when the user scrolls down the page, the Map covers the Sponsored Links showing only the organic results.

And of course, to beat the game of local search, you can:

1) Make sure you are rank in the top 7 for organic results

2) Get your Place Page ranking in the first 7 in Place Search

3) Make sure that your PPC ads appears in the first four-five listing so that you remain in the first fold of the screen

If you click on this link, you can see that we had been able to rank ourselves well for the keyword “seo singapore“.

So if you want to know how we can help you rank well in local search results with the new Place Search, contact us at +65 94500295 or info@advantageseo.net.

Related posts:

1. Google Changed “Sponsored Links” to “Ads”
2. Excuse Me, But Where Did Google’s Organic Search Results Go?
3. Local SEO – A Case Study

Real-time search shows you the latest breaking news the moment it’s happening from social media postings.

From Google:

“First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it’s an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it’s published on the web.”

Watch this Video:

If you were sharp, you would had noticed this “latest news” feature in the recent World Cup 2010, especially when a goal was scored.

To know how we could help you dominate the Search Engines in Real Time search? Contact SEO Singapore agency at +65 9450-0295 or info@advantageseo.net.

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3. Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!

“Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.” Source

You can listen to more about Google Instant in the video below:

In fact, every other article I read about Google Instant says that this is the end of SEO.

An articles says that, if you are searching for “red striped socks”, and “Redbox” or “Red Stripe beer” showed up in the query, the user may deviate from their original search.

If you click on the other suggested answers from Google Instant, chances are that you are distracted by the “Google Suggest” function rather than your intent of search had changed.

End of the day, if your purpose of search is to buy a “red striped socks”, you would go back to your query to search for it again.

Another article says “no two people will see the same web results”. well, but that is “Personalised Search” which had already been around.

I don’t agree that Google Instant would affect the basis of SEO.

The simple theory is: Why is the user searching in the first place if he doesn’t know what he wants?  To try out Google Instant?

If your site is not properly optimized for the right keywords in the first place, you are not getting anywhere, be it Google Instant or not!

This is the simple reason that I feel that  SEO is still relevant (not because that this is our business).

In fact, if you had done a good SEO effort, you site should come up Tops due to Google Instant.

Nevertheless, most SEO practitioners are having a wait and see attitude and in fact, I don’t seems to find any Singapore SEO players commenting on this topic.

For the time being, Google Instant is not available in Google Singapore yet, as it is been rolled out in phrases. But if you want to try it out, go to Google.com.

Keen to know how we can get your site more traffic regardless with Google Instant, call us at +65 6640 9987, or visit our SEO Singapore site.

Related posts:

1. Google Instant For Your Mobile Search
2. Google Real Time Search-What is this?
3. Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!

As a company, Google focuses on three key areas: Search, Ads and Apps. Search is our core technology; ads are our central business proposition; and apps are the umbrella over our web-based software that you can access anywhere, any time. While each of these has a lot of technology under the hood, the basic tenets for Search, Ads and Apps are very simple. We’ve created some short videos explaining the principles behind our core services. For more information or to share your thoughts, visit ourHelp Forum.

How Search Works

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs&feature=player_embedded#!

Source: http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/

Search Engine Optimization Singapore is the process of improving a website such that it best follows the Search Engine’s algorithm, and eventually gets the website highly ranked on the natural results, and thus more traffic.

Google has a complex set of 200 algorithms!

If you like to know how you could get yourself on the first page of Google’s natural results, look for a good Singapore SEO agency to advise you. Contact us at +65 9450-0295 or info@advantageseo.net

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2. What is SEO?
3. Benefits of SEO?

Top 10 for Singapore SEO!

Although only on the number 10 ranking for “Singapore SEO“, it was not by any means an easy task.  Comparing the nine other sites on the same results (SERP), in terms of Domain Age, we are the youngest site (slightly over 6 months).

Google ranks sites base on their “trust’ value of that site derived from over 200 algorithms. A few basic algorithm are : Domain Age, Site content and backlinks. The longer a site had been around, i.e. older domain age, its ”trust” value with Google increases and thus its ranking improves. Been a younger site, we need to prove lots more by writing good and relevant content and build quality backlinks, so as to win the “trust” value of Google.

While most of our time had been spent on helping our clients, I am personally thankful for the dedication and hard work of our team.

Well although we had not relied on this result for our growth, this result does helps to boost our spirits!

Thank you Team!

Adrian Ang, Business Director

P.S. > If you are keen to know how we can help your website achieve top rankings, contact us today at +65 94500295 or email http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us

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3. Google Give Us Our Rank, Our Daily Bread(Crumbs)

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged aboutsite performance.

• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

Apart from improving your site speed, there are said to be over 200+ algorithm that can affect your site rankings in Google.

Read more about our Singapore SEO methodologies and know-how or contact us at tel: +65 94500295 or http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us

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3. Site Speed May Soon Affect Google Page Ranking

Landing pages, which tended to be mass-generated, near identical pages pointing to one money page, became a target for the search engine spam filters.

However, the type of landing page we should take a closer look at is the type of landing page used in PPC – a page carefully crafted to lead a visitor to desired action. SEOs can benefit from applying the same techniques used for creating effective PPC landing pages to their organic pages. After all, we all want visitors to arrive at our pages, and take a desired action.

All Search Is About Connecting With People

Our pages may rank well, but if the visitor doesn’t do something that ultimately leads to more money in our pockets, our sites won’t last long.

In the past, ranking well has led to a pre-occupation with factors like keyword density i.e. repeating keyword phrases often.

However, the search engine algorithm’s are no longer quite so stupid. The need to slavishly repeat keyword phrases in order to rank pales in comparison to other factors. It’s no longer necessary to forsake good copy writing in order to please machine algorithms.

To make our rankings work for us, we must connect with people. This means our pages must talk their language and focus on solving their problems.

A fail in SEO is not missing out on the #1 ranking. A fail in SEO is a visitor clicking back. Do everything to avoid the back click.

Talking People’s Language

People couldn’t care less about you or your company.

People care about themselves.

Take a look at your pages. Do they talk about you, or do they talk about your audience? For a page to work well, it must connect with your audience, and the easiest way to do this is to talk about their wants and desires. If a page doesn’t grab a visitors attention, they won’t persevere, they will click back. What’s a #1 ranking worth if visitors click back?

Here are a few guidelines on how to grab a visitors attention:

Title Tag Text Should Match Your First Headline Or if not matching the phrase exactly, it should be close to it in terms of topic. This reassures to the searcher they are in the right place.

A Search Is Invariably A Question Keyword terms often aren’t phrased as questions, but they are all questions. When people type “buy DVD online”, they’re really saying “where can I buy a DVD online”. Try to determine searcher intent. Decide what the visitors question is, repeat it, then answer it.

Create A Clear Call To Action – what is it you want the searcher to do next? Sign-up? Buy something? Click on Adsense? Make that action clear and obvious.

People Scan – Use big headings. Often. If you’re vague about visitor intent, you can use a number of different headlines, or images, that grab people’s attention in case your lead hook fails.

Use The Word “You” A Lot – it’s all about them. Their problems, their sense of self, their language, their wants and needs. Relegate all the stuff about you, unless they specifically ask for it, or you’re using testimonials.

Every Page On Your Site Is A Landing Page

Every page on your site has potential to pull in visitors.

Even if a page only receives one visit a month, it’s still a landing page. Given that SEO strategy involves building a lot of content, it’s easy to think of “junk” pages low down in your domain structure as unimportant.

However, if people land on those pages, then that’s half the battle won. Those pages will be winners if they lead people to the pages you want them to see. Therefore, every page on your site should contain a clear call to action – leading visitors to the one thing you want people to do.

The Difference Between SEO Landing Pages & PPC Landing Pages

In PPC, the page must be tightly controlled, stay on message and lead a visitor to desired action. Failure to do so means blowing through money.

With SEO, we have more leeway. We can include a variety of text content on pages, as it increases the likelihood of catching long tail phrases. This casts a wider net, and at negligible cost. However, we still need to structure the page well enough so people a) won’t click back and b) will take the desired action.

It’s a good idea to structure a page so – rather obviously – the most important stuff comes first. Make the call to action, wherever it is placed, clear. Relegate superfluous text, which targets long tail variations, below the fold and/or into side links.

Most likely, a few pages on your domain will be doing the gruntwork. Most of your visitors will come in on your home page, or a small collection of well linked pages on your site. Pay careful attention to these pages. They should be as crafted as tightly as a PPC landing page in terms of language and call to action.

Test these pages. Are they converting? What is the abandonment rate? Whilst it can take a while to test and alter SEO pages, it’s worth doing, as incremental gains on a few pages can lead to huge changes when rolled out over an entire site.

What happens if you make a heading bigger? Paragraphs shorter? Reposition page elements? Change the language and pitch? You can also test these variables using a short PPC campaign, of course, and then roll your findings into your SEO strategy. Once you’ve got a winning formula, you can roll it out to every page (landing) page you create.

Related posts:

1. Three Pages from the Same Domain in Google SERPs?
2. Adwords Bans: Poor Landing Page Quality Scores
3. Borrowing From PPC

But thanks for turning up here

The sheer avalanche of SEO information can be overwhelming, for beginners and experts alike. Who do you know who to listen to? What information do you need to know, and what information is filler?

Why should you even listen to SEOBook?

1. Most Information Published On SEO Is Filler

You can learn 80% of what you need to know about SEO pretty quickly. You don’t need the additional 20% in order to achieve, unless you’re a masochist – otherwise known as an SEO professional

Most of the information you’ll come across on the topic of SEO is written by, and for, a professional/enthusiast crowd. There is a massive echo chamber of opinion, constantly replenished, produced using publishing tools based on the notion of communicating something, often.

It can result in a lot of noise, and not much in the way of signal, especially when you’re learning. If you’re starting out, and want to focus on learning SEO, it’s a good idea to tune the industry chatter out. It’s more likely to confuse than help in the early stages.

2. Understand The Business Of Search

Search engines aren’t your friend. At best, they tolerate SEO, but only when it aligns with company goals.

The search engines have a business to run, and their goals aren’t the same as yours. Whilst search engine reps often come across as helpful and friendly, because they typically are helpful and friendly people, keep in mind that what they are saying serves their company first and foremost. Any advice they give you is, quite rightly, designed to further company goals.

That’s their job.

Chances are, your goals and the search engines goals will be aligned in many areas, but take their advice with a grain of salt. They don’t care if your site succeeds or not, as there are plenty of other sites to index.

3. Define Goals

Before you undertake SEO, define your website goals. Do you want to make more money? Get more attention? Get more leads?

The purpose of SEO is to get your site seen in the search engines. Your aim is to attract the visitors that help you achieve your goals. A high ranking for a certain keyword won’t necessarily help you achieve your goals unless your site matches visitor intent.

Think about the web from a visitors point of view. What do they want to find? What content will they engage with? What will they spend their money on?

There’s little point ranking well if the content you provide doesn’t make you money and/or gain audience. It’s getting increasingly difficult to rank pages that aren’t closely aligned with the searchers intent. So, the more you understand your audience, and the more content that matches their intent, the more you’ll get out of SEO.

4. Get A Credible, Well Organized Course

Like SEOBook’s course for example

This isn’t a sales pitch. There are a number of great courses out there. Choose one or two that suit your budget and objectives, and dive in. Chances are, you will need to shell out some money, but the cost of a decent, well structured course is nothing compared to the wasted effort spent heading in the wrong direction.

In a nutshell, SEO is about about publishing content people want to engage with, and linking. You need to create content that matches visitor intent, you need to be crawlable, and you need to have inbound links. Good SEO courses will have this message at their core.

Did I mention links enough?

5. Connect With People

It’s natural to want the secret sauce – those secret dark techniques that result in number one rankings.

Whilst this was characteristic of SEO years ago, it’s less true now. These days, SEO is more a holistic, strategic process aimed at connecting with people, as opposed to a dark, technical art aimed at tricking machines.

Focus on making connections with people. That means understanding what people want. You can do this by undertaking basic market research, using the search engines themselves!

6. Test

Don’t listen to me. Well, maybe just a bit. Don’t listen to the repeaters in forums.

Test and measure for yourself. It’s one of the best SEO courses you can do. It’s ongoing, and it’s free.

Start with a simple, focused well constructed site. What is a well constructed site in terms of SEO?

With every change you make, every new SEO strategy you adopt, test the results. Did the change help you achieve your website goals? Did you get more traffic? Better quality traffic? If your rankings improved, did this result in more/better traffic? It can be difficult to isolate variables at the best of times, but there is no chance of doing so if you try too many techniques all at once.

Make changes one step at a time. Test and measure repeat. Become at expert at measuring SEO against your goals.

Build up your own private knowledge base of SEO in your niche. Your niche may require different strategies to other niches, which is why well-meaning advice in forums and on blogs can hinder you. You’ll also become a better judge of who is offering you good advice, and who is just repeating something they heard.

Related posts:

1. Crafting SEO Landing Pages
2. What is SEO?
3. Top 10 rank for Singapore SEO!

Not in a bad way, of course

Here are some ideas on how to construct winning proposals.

Size Isn’t Everything, But It Does Count

Large proposals take a long time to do. On the upside, large proposals can look impressive, simply by virtue of their size. Clients often like to see large proposals, but they don’t tend to read them.

Proposals can be a tricky balance to get right. No matter how brilliant your solution, most clients will think twice about you if you present it on a single sheet, especially if they have no prior connection with you, or aren’t meeting you face-to-face. A proposal of a certain size can appear more authoritative.

What is the ideal size?

One good way of presenting a proposal is to break it into three parts. The first part is a summary, including your client-specific solution and costs. Length can vary of course, but keep it succinct. No fat.

The second part is a case study or two. Again, keep them succinct. It’s highly likely that the client won’t actually read beyond this point.

Finally, add background information about you, your company, your history and the SEO business, all of which should be aimed at supporting the summary page and case studies. This final part can be generic and doesn’t need to be re-written for each client. Clients may only flip through this section, but tend to find it reassuring that it exists.

Contrast this approach with a proposal that is threadbare. It may be irrational, but thin proposals can feel incomplete.

Give Something Of Value Away

In your summary pages, share real information.

Share the type of information that is valuable and the sort of you’d usually charge for providing. Clients are likely to assume that if the SEO is giving a few morsels of valuable information away in the proposal, then even more valuable information will be forthcoming if they sign you. Demonstrate your mastery. If all you do is provide generic information at this point, then your proposal is less likely to stand out.

Some potential clients, of course, may pick your brain and then implement your solutions themselves. Whilst this can happen, it’s unlikely. The client already knows they want SEO by the time they’re at the proposal stage, and if they could have done this work themselves, they probably would have done so already.

Secondly, you can outline solutions that involve time cost to achieve. Imply that this work must be undertaken by someone who knows what they are doing. Outline the risks of not doing this work properly. The more real work, and risk, there is invlolved in implementation, the less likely a client will be willing to go the do-it-yourself route.

As we all know, there is a lot of real work involved in SEO. Make sure the client is left in no doubt on that aspect.

It’s Not About You

Focus on the clients needs.

Nothing loses a potential client faster than an SEO who talks entirely about themselves and their industry. Clients don’t care. Clients care about their problems and their industry. In the summary pages, restate the clients problem and propose your specific solutions. Outline time frame and costs.

This exercise is useful for a number of reasons, the main one being that you, or the client, may not know what the actual problem is!

What a client says may not be what they mean. For example, the client may say they want SEO because they’re heard that’s a great way to get traffic quickly. They may not say it in these words, of course. They may say they want SEO, and they want it asap.

However, if the SEO has asked enough questions, aimed at identifying the problem, the SEO may unearth unstated problems. In this case, a client wants to increase traffic quickly. A solution to such a problem might be a combination of SEO and PCC. The PPC delivers immediate traffic while the SEO strategy might take some time.

Formulate questions aimed at identifying the clients actual, as opposed to stated, problem. They may be quite different. The result is that your solution will be a good fit, which will lead to less frustration, on both sides, further down the line.

You also might discover at this point that the clients expectations are ridiculous, and you’d be better off looking for a more reasonable client. For example, I was once pitching to a large advertising company. Their clients had been asking for SEO, so all they knew is they “needed some SEO”.

Great.

Problem was, as I discovered in the meeting, was that they knew nothing about the need to alter sites or web publishing approach. They had told clients they could deliver SEO as a bolt-on-service, a wave of the magic wand that miraculously delivered rankings and free traffic for life to brochure sites.

I didn’t go any further with them.

Offer Guarantees (Assurance)

Guarantees are a contentious issue in SEO circles.

Many SEOs – quite rightly – point out that no one can guarantee a ranking position, which is true, but such technical nuances may unsettle a client.

Clients tend to like assurance, and a guarantee can help provide this. So rather than dismissing guarantees, look at aspects you can guarantee.

A fiend of mine, in a different industry, offers a guarantee that goes along the lines of “if you don’t feel satisfied after our strategy meetings with you, even after you sign the contract, you can walk away, no questions asked, and no charge.”.

That sounds like something substantial, but actually he is just restating consumer law in the country where he lives. The law is that a service must be fit for the purpose the client intended, and if it isn’t, the client has a case against the provider for non-suitability of service.

My friend realized he could never afford to contest such cases, and would likely lose, as the consumer law favored the buyer. All an aggrieved client really had to do to win such a case was say the service wasn’t fit for their purposes.

He was dealing with firms with deep pockets, and legal action defending against such firms would come at high cost, even if he was in the right, so he decided to restate a consumer right the client actually already had, combined with an economic reality – his inability to engage in costly legal battles – into a form of a reassuring guarantee for sales purposes.

Case Studies Are Powerful

There is no sales tool quite so powerful as a good case study. A case study is a story. People love stories. A case study is also proof of your ability.

Outline the problem. Tell your audience what the problem looked like before you started – very useful if this problem is similar to the problem the prospective client also faces – what you did to solve the problem, and the positive results of your solution.

Stories are very powerful sales tools, and a case study is a great opportunity to tell a few.

Package It Up

Consider printing and binding your proposal, and delivering it.

We receive so many emails these days that they don’t make us feel very special. It doesn’t feel like there is much effort gone into them. A binded proposal, on the other hand, feels substantial.

In the interests of speed, you can still send an email copy, but try doing both and seeing if you land more deals.

Charging

Don’t undercharge. You’ll regret it

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