Is Google Getting Into Flight Comparison Shopping?

While looking up the distance between my hometown and Vancouver to find out how far away a friend was from me, I came across this:

If you look at that, you’ll notice there is a spot for you to enter your departure and return date. It seems Dean Cruddace was able to reproduce the same results with his query:

Google now selling flights? No! They’re pushing travel sites. When you click the link, you get this:

Interesting right? But wait! There’s more!

The site links below the title link are as follows:

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Expedia – Travelocity – Priceline – Orbitz – Hotwire – Kayak – CheapOair

Now, the title link has several referrers: http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=fexp&flag=q&city1=YXH&citd1=YVR&time1=720&time2=720&cAdu=1&cSen=0&cChi=0&cInf=&infs=2&date1=10/29&date2=11/05

The site links? As Thomas Fjordside pointed out, some have ref=googleflightlink. Others have what looks to be affiliate codes, and others have nothing really substantial aside from tracking codes.

So what’s the deal here?

Are these sites simply authority sites? Has a deal been reached with the companies? Or is this something they’re just testing and those are the sites they picked out of their magic hat?

Google Beating Up On the Small Guys By Profiting Off the Big Guns?

This has me asking lots of questions:

  • Has Google entered into partnership with Expedia?
  • What about the little guys who are missing out on the profits?
  • Will this spread to hotels, cruises, tours, car rentals, and other competitive niches in the travel industry?

Not sure I like what’s going on here, but I’m sure we’ll find out more in the near future. I’m going to do a bit more digging around, and I’ll get back to you when I find out more. In the meantime, have a look yourself and let us know what you find!

What are your thoughts on the new feature? How could clients use that to their advantage?

The Fine Art Of Creating a Guest Posting Strategy

When was the last time you created a guest posting strategy? How carefully do you choose the destination sites for your content?

Guest blogging or content placement is one of my favorite ways to build good links, expand a company’s reach, build authority, and bring more traffic to a site.

Guest posts can also be a smart alternative to paid links — many believe the links acquired through guest posting are worth more because they’re located in the content rather than in a sidebar or list of links. They’re less likely to disappear, they have a one-time cost, and give you the most bang for your buck.

If you want all this, however, you can’t just drop guest posts on the first site you come across. You have to choose the destination sites very carefully.


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Find Authority Sites To Guest Post On

Social Media Today recently published a post that listed 10 Places To Find Blogs To Guest Post On. In it, the author listed several places that upkeep collections of authority sites. And while this is excellent advice and works well, you can’t rely on this alone.

First, let’s not forget about search. After all, these sites just don’t have a complete, comprehensive list. Advanced search queries are a powerful way to find good guest posting opportunities. You can find out more about advanced search queries here:


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Sort the Great Guest Posting Opportunities From the Good Ones

Finding the best places to guest post involves more than just locating authority sites on a related topic. In fact, if you focus purely on the link value of guest blogging, you’re missing out on the real SEO and marketing value that can come out of this practice.

You need to find a spot to guest post that matches your goals and attracts your specific target audience. It should reflect the skills or strengths of your business and possibly even open the door to future opportunities.

Being a copywriter, you’d think I’d post mostly on copywriting sites. This isn’t true. Instead, you’ll find I frequent SEO, Social Media, and Internet marketing sites as well as various industry-specific sites. Why? While there are plenty of authority sites in the copywriting industry, there is little value in it for me:

  • I’m rarely hired by other copywriters.
  • My customers rarely read sites focused on copywriters.
  • My business and I are painted into a corner. If I only post on copywriting sites, I’m perceived as being strictly a good writer, and while I do have excellent copywriting skills, I’m much more than that. To be a great copywriter, you need to know about much more than just having good spelling and grammar. In reality, copywriting online involves SEO, Social Media, conversion optimization, branding, business, marketing, usability, buyer behavior, and much more.
  • There’s little opportunity for growth if I stay within the copywriting niche.
  • I have more competition within the industry. This isn’t to say other copywriters disappear once you leave the industry, but unless you’re willing to get out there and stand out, you’ll blend in.

When I guest post, I focus on helping others see the value in quality copywriting and showing them how to use it to their advantage. I help others understand how to integrate content into their businesses and websites, how to create winning content strategies, and how to achieve and surpass their goals because, ultimately, that’s what my products and services do.

In return, my guest posts have earned award nominations, become a recommended resource for governments and university professors, generated clients, and opened the door to opportunities I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. This is all in addition to the link juice, buzz, traffic, and additional links the practice initially created. This would have been much more difficult to accomplish if I had stayed on my own blog.

I would say these types of benefits are worth the time invested in choosing guest post destinations, and far more valuable than a $2,000 paid link, don’t you think?

You can and should do the same with your guest posting strategy. To get started:

  • Make a list of authority blogs and content-based sites.
  • Study their style, direction and audience.
  • Make connections with the site owners.
  • Craft and publish your content.

That’s it!

Do you have a guest posting strategy?

Is Personalization Changing Your Game Plan?

The Web is changing. Big surprise, right? Well, it might be for those who aren’t prepared or fail to see what’s going on.
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In recent months, Google has introduced social and real time results to its regular SERPs in addition to an increase in personalization. With more and more people out of work and bending under financial strain, new websites and competition are popping up everywhere. The big question is what are you doing about it?

In terms of basic SEO, there isn’t much besides keeping up with the changes and doing what you can. Social Media is definitely starting to play a much larger role in many marketing plans. In fact, the latest study suggests 66% of government agencies have even got onboard. But what about your marketing plans and the strategies you create for others? Are they changing with the introduction of personalization and an increase in competition?

The Internet Marketer’s Guide to Battling Personalization?

One thing is for sure, sites that don’t cater to the user are going to be left behind, if they haven’t been already. Site owners need to start considering how they’ll go the extra mile in order to make the user feel at home and become a favorite. On the other hand, webmasters also need to keep it profitable. No easy task, for sure.

Usability

Usability has become almost a trend word, but there really is something to it. After all, the more easily I can navigate your site and find what I want, the more money I’m likely to spend. You might be thinking your website is already quite user friendly, but like someone who smells his own body odor for too long, it can be hard to spot the obvious.

Having a usability expert is one way to fix this. And, if you choose a good one, you’ll find that he or she has the uncanny ability to spot things that most of us don’t think of until they’re fixed. If you can’t afford one, but would still like to make improvements, talk to a partially technologically-challenged person and have them test your site.

Sit down with them at the computer and watch as they go through your website completing various tasks. This could include purchasing an item, signing up to your RSS feeds, finding specific information, and many other seemingly simple actions. Take note of how long it takes them to complete each thing, where they look, and the items they click on. You’ll find that doing this with a few people will help identify trouble spots. (Bonus tip: When they first open the site, ask them what the site is about and what they see first. This can be extremely powerful information!)

Conversion Optimization

Often confused with usability, conversion optimization can be a long, drawn out process. Experts in this field use analytics, live tracking, and many other components and tools to figure out what types of visitors use your site, what they’re looking for, and where they’re going. From there, they will create defined paths customized to meet the needs of each type of (profitable) visitor in order to boost conversions.

While this is no easy feat, there are steps you can take on your own to improve conversions. Site testing, analyzing your own analytics by creating custom events, and using tracking codes to find out what your customers are up to, what they like, and what they don’t like. Then, you can make the appropriate changes and test it out.

Site Optimization

While this is technically part of usability, SEO, and conversion optimization, I think it’s important enough to deserve its own category. This covers the technical side of the website and makes it work more efficiently and more accurately. In my eyes, this breaks down into two areas:

Data Optimization — This is a big one for sites with large amounts of information that are accessed by the user (For example, online catalogs, complex structures with numerous departments). These techniques use various structures and code systems to organize this data, recall it faster, and more accurately.

Web Design Optimization — Techniques such as combining or separating images into PSDs, improving the focus on particular elements, and improving the loading of the CSS through Javascript make the site faster, improve usability, and boost conversions.

These things might not help you overcome the effects of personalization and an increase in competition, but they can certainly help. If nothing else, you’ll be able to make the most of the traffic you do get.

So, what are you doing to help counteract personalization and improve the performance of your site?

The Modern Version of Customer Service: A Note to SEO Naysayers

The entire concept of people squabbling over the death or validity of SEO is absurd, completely ridiculous, and a waste of valuable time on all sides. If I hear someone tell me ‘they don’t use SEO because it’s evil and the Google gods will smite them and wipe them from existence if they use it’ one more time, I’m going to need one of these:


(Curious Expeditions)

You know what? If you own a website, you’re already using SEO. It might not have the most effective tactics on the planet or be one of the worst methods to ever hit the WWW, but it’s still SEO. Don’t believe me? Answer these questions and assign one point for each ‘yes’ answer:

  • Does your website have a URL?
  • Does your site contain text?
  • How about images? (one point for each pic)
  • Do you give visitors the option to explore your site via navigation?
  • Does your site contain any links to any other internal or external page?

Here’s the deal: if you scored ’1′ or more on this test, you’re using SEO. And if you own a website and you’ve called SEO evil, denounced its existence, or said it’s dead, you’re an idiot. Congratulations.

URLs, text, images, navigation, links and many other features are all part of SEO. They’re just done well, poorly, or disgustingly.

SEO isn’t about title tags, anchor text, or what color hat you wear. It’s not dead because, last time I checked, it isn’t breathing, it doesn’t grow, and doesn’t have life. SEO isn’t about how good your buddies think you are, or whether you made it onto some list somewhere as the biggest marketer on the planet. Let’s knock off the bullshit and just cut to the nitty gritty shall we?

SEO is about usability. Period. It’s about making your website, content, ad, or whatever easier to use for both crawlers and humans. It’s about getting found for the right things and providing ‘good customer service’ from the moment someone finds your site until he leaves. It’s no different than keeping the aisles of your store clean, the shelves and racks neat and someone at the cash register.

Got it? Good! So, now that we’ve got that sorted, let’s look at the two basic ‘rules’ of SEO.

If something makes your website more user friendly, easier to explore, and more effective, do it. If it makes the site impossible to identify, difficult to use, complicated, and just plain nasty, or if it clutters up the Web and becomes a pain in the Equus Asinus, it’s a bad thing. Don’t do it. No! Don’t! That’s enough of that silliness.

Now, I know this has been harsh, but it’s for your own good.

If I can’t use your site, or have to fight with you to sell me something, I’m just going to go elsewhere and so will everyone else who might happen to stumble across your site while searching for ‘pink and purple polka dotted squirrels with eating disorders, bald tails, and bad attitudes’. (If your site provides information on pink with purple polka dotted squirrels with eating disorders, bald tails, and bad attitudes, you’re in luck.)

Whether you like it or not, you have to cater to your customer, regardless of whether it’s a human customer or a bot.

I think most would agree that SEO is constantly evolving and changing. It needs to in order to continue serving visitors of all kinds effectively. But, so long as websites exist, SEO will always be there in some way, shape, or form.

Done deal. Can we get on with it now?

WordPress SEO Basics – Optimize The Entire Blog Post

Word Press SEO Secrets Sample

In yesterday’s post, WordPress SEO – How To Make Money With A Blog By Driving Traffic, I mentioned that you need to optimize several areas of a post. If you want to get the most Google power out of every post, you will need to focus on the four main areas of a post.

Optimizing Post Content

The content of the actual post always comes first. After all, the entire point of a blog is to provide searchers with the needed information. Your job is to use this basic concept to attract attention. Put yourself into the searcher’s computer chair to find the keywords you need for your post.

Imagine you are a searcher or customer. What words would you use? What questions would you have? Once you know what these questions are, answer them! To optimize the post, pick out the keywords and use them throughout your post as frequently as you can without sounding like a robot. Many times, optimizing a blog post requires nothing more than replacing some of the pronouns and verbs.

Provide SEO Optimized Subheadings

Subheadings are as beneficial to blog post SEO as they are for your readers. Visitors want information, and they want it yesterday. As a result, they skim rather than read every word on a page. Subheadings break up the blog post into smaller sections.

These titles attract the visitors wandering eye, so they find the information they need faster. Once they find this, they stick around for a bit. Every second they spend on your blog, the more they will look around, and the more likely you are to have them return later on.

Subtitles have additional weight with the search engines for this same reason. Use this to your advantage! Add the keywords for the post into these subheadings, and use the settings in WordPress to change the formatting. You can find these settings by clicking the button called the ‘kitchen sink.’ This option is found on the second row under ‘format.’

Improve The SEO Power Of Post Titles

Google may like subtitles, but it loves post titles. When you publish a post, you’ll notice that the main post title also appears on the browser tab and at the top of the browser window. To optimize this, you have two choices: Make sure your keywords are included in the title, or use a plug in that allows you to change this.

In addition to your keywords, ensure your title entices your reader while still matching the content of the post. You can’t always get the best of both worlds, but it should definitely be your main goal.

Make Use Of Post Slugs And Permalinks

Think of the slug for your post as its filename. This seemingly unimportant feature can make a big difference in Google’s search results. In WordPress, your post title automatically becomes the slug, and this becomes the rest of its permalink.

Set up your blog so you can edit this slug, and improve the SEO power of your permalink. As Michael says, they become ‘pretty permalinks.’ The idea is to take out all of the useless words (as far as Google is concerned) until all that remains are your main keywords.

It really isn’t as difficult as it sounds at first. With the additional hints and tips that Michael provides in his study course ‘WordPress SEO Secrets: Search Optimization Magic for WordPress Blogs,’ these concepts become even easier to put into practice. His program makes it virtually impossible to goof up. It includes an ebook to read and refer back to, audio that builds on the book, and video to show you exactly how to go through the process step-by-step. He doesn’t just read the ebook to you. Instead, he explains why one way of doing things is better than another, why you are doing what you’re doing, and exactly how to go through the process from start to finish.

‘WordPress SEO Secrets: Search Optimization Magic for WordPress Blogs’ launches tomorrow! You definitely don’t want to miss out on this product launch. The information you learn here will certainly set your writing apart from others. To make sure you don’t miss this, or my full review of the product tomorrow, make sure to subscribe to the Angie’s Copywriting RSS Feed. If feed readers aren’t your forte, you can receive Angie’s Copywriting updates by email.

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