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Submit Url Yandex
15
Oct
Oct
Yandex (or Яндекс) is the largest Russian search engine with 55% of market share.
Yandex, a leader in Russia
Like Baidu (for China), this search engine beat Google on its own country (Google has 21% of market share in Russia).
Yandex, page rank tool
Like Google, with the PageRank, Yandex give grades to trusted websites. This “quotation index” doesn’t affect your website ranking but you must consider it for your search engine optimization. This value can be calculate with the Yandex Toolbar and it vary from 0 to 150 000. Go here to install the yandex pagerank toolbar
Other services
Also, Yandex provide a lot of other services like Yandex Market, Yandex Maps, Yandex Traffic, Yandex Money, Yandex Email, Yandex Traffic, Yandex News and Yandex Advertising.
How to be indexed on Yandex
Yandex give priority to Russian websites so if you want to be sure to be indexed on Yandex, you should create a russian content. Then, go to the Yandex webmaster page, paste your url, enter the captcha and it’s done.
BTW, go here if you want to submit your url to the chinese baidu
SEO and the Golden Triangle, Split-second choice
4
Oct
Oct
For most people that work at SEO, including us (or THEM), the reason why search rankings matter is clear. We know that for many sites, the traffic from search engines is a key to success. We also know that the first search results in a query are the ones users click on; and most users do not click "Next results" in their search engine.
But explaining this to Average Joe is not nearly as compelling as you would expect (our experience says so!). Many people I know do not understand why SEO is useful for a website. How to prove that SEO is of key importance for a website? Try the "(Google's) Golden Triangle"!
The Golden Triangle (here purple) may not be news for many of you, this aspect of search users experience has been studied many times. Look, the darker areas in the picture were looked at more than the lighter ones and some areas are not even looked at.
Want some stats on users behavior? In tests 100% of the users look at the first 3 results, and only a 20% of the users will look at the 10th search result*. Moreover, after being actually looked at, the result will have a fraction of a second to convince the user that clicking it will satisfy his query. For that the site will need a very good, convincing teaser text (or snippet).
Will you have a chance? Find out now, just try checking your rankings in the right column or go to the "Ranking tool" to see your results!
The Google’s User Experience Research team offers deep information on the Golden Triangle on their blog. I thank them for the useful info!
*Check the Organic Ranking Visibility at Eyetools Google Research.
Twitter Funny Video
24
Sep
Sep
just a little twitter funny video, i know this blog is more about seo, but sometimes, i cannot resist to temptation.
You know twitter if you are familiar with social media and online marketing, and you remember that you can only write 140 character in each message. Now imagine if you had the same thing in real life, a twitter life, that's what this funny video is all about.
Twitter, SEO and China
21
Sep
Sep
If used appropriately Twitter can generate some seriously good traffic to your website, there are tons of posts about how to do this on the web. Have you tried searching for site:twitter.com in Google recently? You get 137 million search results.
Let's see the case of our favorite company, them.pro. In a Google search, our twitter account, twitter.com/seochina (search it), almost every tweet appears, and in the search: "SEO China" it gets the 14th position. We are getting backlinks not only to our website but to our tweets! Bottom line, "tweeting" works.
It is a cheap and easy way to generate traffic from anywhere in the world… but how about China? Just like Facebook and Youtube, Twitter is blocked in the whole country. Before it was blocked, Twitter was becoming a popular service in China and many Chinese were using it on daily basis. Now, similar (clone) services like jiwai.de and t.sina.com.cn are there to fill up the space Twitter left.
So can we still use Twitter? Of course! It is still possible to tweet in China without much hassle… we use ping.fm and our followers are still subscribing from in and out of China. The effort is not lost, our advice is, even in China, tweet, tweet, tweet…
Bing Visual Search : Beautiful and Useless
16
Sep
Sep
What is bing visual search? well it's just a "new way" for navigation online, using images instead of words. You can for example chose a theme (travel) that you recognise with the image, and then chose a city, that you try to recognise with the image. Actually, i was looking for beijing, and it's impossible to recognize it. it's not the forbidden city, nor the summer palace, it's some view maybe from chaoyang which was used...
Visual Search Goes Faster?
microsoft says the search is faster. trueth is the search is... longer. specially when at the end, if you click on the picture of beijing, all they are doing actually is... typing beijing for you in the search field of bing... is that a joke? no... doesn't it go faster to type "beijing" in the search field... "YES, it does".
Silverlight Needed
To use this "new way" for surfing, you need to install silverlight, the microsoft competitor product for flash. is it worth it? NO. I'll keep you posted and will tell you if something new is really interesting, but for this, it's just not interesting, not important, useless thing. but it's beautiful, is that enough?
i'll give you the link anyways, but i warned you click here for bing visual search (but you'd better keep on reading this seo blog ;0)
Website Purpose : Assign a Goal
15
Sep
Sep
Create a web site… what for? This is the first question you have to wonder about. Why should I create a website? Sometimes the answer is easy, sometimes it’s not. I see many brands having websites just to have websites, with no goal assigned except showing images of the product. Is that helping their business?
Why to have a website :
- To sell online, by using this new distribution channel.
o People can buy online and you deliver the product to their homes, using this new retail store.
- To have business leads (that’s the goal of this website ;o), and increase business.
o People will come, check your services…and then let you call them or email them.
- To provide a service to your consumers.
o For example, many computer manufacturers have their drivers on their websites, so that their clients can download them.
- To build a community
o To have feedback on your products. To give more to those who really love your brand (discounts, parties)
- To build trust in your company
o I had a client who didn’t care about leads. He said “100% of my clients don’t come from a website, because our business is about 100 millions, all I need is that, once they come on my website, they leave it with the idea I am a great pro”. So, it’s a support for its communication, and help him build trust among would be customers.
- Become famous (and improve brand awareness)
o Yes, that could be a goal, for a brand or for a person. Well, the website you design and build with that in mind has to serve this purpose. For example, it has to be really original, otherwise you’re just one among others. To the contrary, in the example above, in the “build trust” website, you don’t need to be original.
- Reduce recruitment costs
o You probably know that. It you have traffic, just post job ads and you’ll have Resumes. Besides, that’s like a pre-qualifying candidates, because they already are interested in your brand/services/product.
- Reduce advertising costs
o By having a search engine friendly website and good rankings, you can reduce your online ads costs.
- For Family and friends.
o Don’t laugh! That’s the website purpose of many personal blogs. And if you knew the number of personal blogs out there… you would certainly not laugh.
- Share information
o You have a knowledge, you speak that very rare language, and you’re afraid your knowledge will die with you. You want to share knowledge, information, because you have a very warm heart. (yeah, that would never work you think? Well… one small website is called Wikipedia, did you hear about it?)
You can think of hundreds of goals and purposes for a website. What is important is that you have this objective clear in your mind, and build a website to serve a GOAL(s). Would I blog if I didn’t want to have leads for my web design and seo services? ;o)
What is your website purpose?
Google Internet Stats
14
Sep
Sep
Google launched Google Internet Stats, a new service (surprising ;o) that is really going to be useful for internet marketing. They compile statistics from many sources, some internal like google trends, and some from other sources like eurostat, financial times, economist, etc.
Google Internet Stats is only available in the uk for now (so not very useful for us in china), but still, it’s only a test, and there are big chances for this service to meet success. We just have to wait a little before we can use it in the rest of the world (yeah, frustrating, I know…)
These statistics are NOT ONLY about INTERNET and ecommerce, it can be on any subject as we can see in the following example: On January 26th 2009, more than 76,000 job cuts were announced worldwide in a single day (source : financial times 2009)
To use it, just go on Google Internet Stats
Duplicate Content: do Google really detect it?
10
Sep
Sep
Why am I wondering if Google can detect duplicate content? well, because I see many examples while online of people and websites who obviously are trying to trick the king of search engines, and who actually succeed.
Easy to copy!
Not with a very complicated infrastructure, nor by paying 10 215 people doing this and clicking there, which would be difficult for google to detect, but just by using very simple duplicate content technics (… I know, I was surprised too).
SEO Services Company Here!
An Example ? well, of course I come with an example for you, I know you would NOT believe me otherwise (I am not speaking about you mom, I know you believe me no matter what ;o)
So, here this Indian website, their technique is really simple, they target the search query or keywords “SEO Services Company” + “a place”.
For example : “SEO services company budapest” or “seo services company oxford”
They created a page for every city, or state, with the city keyword in the title and url. yes, only the city name was different, not the rest of the text of the page, which means that on this website, 99% of the words in each page are … the same. On each page, there are internal links to the other pages, with the name of the city in the achor text like on the picture here under :
Google says no: but obviously "YES YOU CAN"
Still, Google doesn’t ban them. Actually it’s even worse (or better, depending on the point of view ;o), but they are ranking 1st on some of these cities! How come google doesn’t detect the trick while the pages are mearly copies ? I don’t know. I think it’s not that hard to compare the text of each page and see if 99% of the words are the same, or is it?
Black hat SEO is Risky SEO
I am not advising you to use this technique OF COURSE, that’s black hat SEO, and that annoys Google (and the people using it), because when you put “SEO Services company” with the name of a city, that clearly means that you want the company to be in that city, not in India (although India is beautiful). The day Google will be able to detect this fraud… the website is going down, deep down, and that would be a risk for your online business.
Google and Duplicate Content detection and NoFollow
It reminds me that everyone was thinking that google was taking the nofollow tag into account, until google (actually, matt cutts) said it didn’t. Isn’t it the same with duplicate content? Can they detect it?
Check the Rankings
You can check the rankings of this website I am talking about here under, In many cases, the website is ranking number one (and you can check your own rankings in google and baidu using our tool here). Also, let me know what you think about it, please use comments below to start the discussion:
impressive isn't it? well, still, don't follow this example... by the way "hhh" was just a test of mine that i forgot on the picture ;o)
National vs International Domain Name Extension and SEO
7
Sep
Sep
We did a few tests about the differences between national and international domain extensions regarding SEO, and the rankings of these websites in national search engines like google china baidu or bing. (check your rankings in google and baidu here)
What is a Domain name Extension?
- International domain name extensions like : .Com, .Net , .Org or .Pro
- National domain name extensions like: .de (Germany), .fr (France), .cn (China)
What was the Test ?
We launched several websites, with the same domain name, but with different domain name extensions (some national domain name extensions and some international). We let the search engines crawle them and index them, and then we test their rankings.
Results
It appears clearly that the national domain extensions has a very strong impact on the rankings of websites in the designated country.
Actually, the National Domain Name Extension is more important than :
- The language used on the website
- The IP location of the hosting
For example, we did the test with the Chinese national domain name extension which is .CN, but the website was hosted in a European country, and the language of the website was English.
Still, the website was ranking better in google.CN (China) than in google.Com (language of the website) or google.DE (the hosting country). Why was it ranking better in google china? Well, the only link between these websites and China was the national domain name extension, and obviously, it’s weight on the rankings was considerable.
Conclusions
National domain name extensions are very very important to your SEO and your Rankings. (but still, you might chose an international domain name extension because of your branding strategy, etc. SEO is something you must consider, but not something that should replace ALL of your former marketing tools)
Our ranking study also showed that the “country” of your backlinks are also very important for your rankings in that country. To make it clear : if you have a website in the USA, but the majority of your backlinks are coming from England, your website is going to rank higher in Google England.
So remember, post the backlinks in the country you target (not only the language you target).
Google is Google, not by Chance:
Google is the smartest. On bing and baidu, we reached directly very high positions because of the domain names we’ve chosen and the domain names extensions, and we shouldn’t have. We had only 2 pages on the websites, a very young age for the domain names, and very few backlinks.
That’s also no surprise as we have seen in the comparison between google and bing : “weight of keywords in urls on your rankings”
Google seemed to have a more wise approach and more balanced algorithm, which makes the search “safer” and with better quality.
SNS in China, Everyone Increases... but Facebook
28
Aug
Aug
Every social network system is growing in China... except facebook, because as we told you before, facebook is blocked in china.
When I see the hard time google is having to gain market shares against baidu (which has about 70% market share here in china), I think facebook is not likely to get back in the competition. When facebook will be accessible again, it will be too late. Specially because chinese users won't go from xiaonei or kaixin001 to facebook if they already have their contacts in these two sns.
Facebook, to get back in the game, will have to buy one of these sns (maybe xiaonei, because xiaonei is a copy of facebook, so users won't have difficulties to adapat to facebook's interface).
Another thaught is... if these sns become bigger and stronger, won't they try to compete with facebook in other countries?
Once more, local players are doing better in china than international ones (I know, with a little help ;o) but still, i think that if you want to be in the chinese market... the best thing you could do is ... coming to China.
