photo credit: Tony Webster

Most of them are pretty worthless: They either nave no PageRank, no traffic or allow no dofollow links (unless you upgrade and pay between $1 and $50). But there are some press release distribution sites that have PageRank, good traffic and allow links that are dofollow.

If a press release service is not syndicated by Google News, it’s plain worthless. I’ve submitted to them just to have some more meat for the story. If I would have only used services that submit to Google, you might have take that fact for granted.

By the way, there is one secret weapon in regards to press release services. It brings you the PR News Wire distribution (at least the online part) for only $350 as opposed to $650 directly. Just give me a call to find out more

UPdate 12/26/2010:

www.prlog.com is now listed in Google news.

Photo Credit: CMJ Stock

How long does it take until you see results? It is very difficult to give a general answer on this. Once I start on a project, you’ll usually see some kind of movement within the first 3 to 4 weeks. But that does not mean much. You will see a handful of visitors and your ranking for your targeted keywords will go from maybe nowhere to number 30 or 40.

A few weeks later,  about 6 to 8 weeks you should see some further climbing up the ranks. Your main keyword or keywords will by now probably be sitting on the second page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Depending on your market, that can already mean some kind of traffic, but usually it’s just a trickle.

“Since there are only 10 places and many millions of websites you can’t just expect to be lucky enough to appear on the first page for your target keyword and phrases. It takes planning, hard work and a certain amount of expertise. That’s where SEO comes in. Optimizing your website involves work both on and off of the pages. It is important that your site is built to a high standard, all the links must work and the content has to be both keyword rich and relevant.” Via google-pageone.co.uk

After 3 to 6 month, with ongoing search engine optimization work, you should see your main keyword appear on the first page of the results. And another 6 to 8 month later should be rewarded with some solid top rankings. This could mean Google #1, or at least on page 1 and within the  3 to 5.

But all this depends on so many factors, that it is very difficult to give an answer that is true for the majority of the cases. Or to state it different: I have seem sites going from nowhere (just registered) to solid top rankings with several weeks and on other sites it too almost 2 years of solid work to achieve similar results.

So, what do we learn from that? Doing the right things, doing just enough of it and your site will be at or near the top. If you want to get an idea what it takes to achieve excellent results, I suggest to read Google Ranking Factors – SEO Checklist. If you calculate several months and don’t freak out if the phone does not ring off the hook after a week or two, I can work with or for you. If you need miracles over night, go fishing elsewhere (and hope to not get caught with your pants down…).

A leading online competitive intelligence service, Experian Hitwise accounced yesterday that Google accounted for 71.57 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Nov. 28, 2009. Yahoo! Search received 15.39 percent, Microsoft’s Bing 9.34 percent and Ask.com received 2.65 percent. The remaining 52 search engines that were not explicitly named in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.07 percent of U.S. searches.

If you are interested in up-to-date analysis of online trends, you can visit the Hitwise Research Blog .

This table is not completely correct. The data is obviously a little slanted towards Google. It counts ALL traffic to Google, while it only counts a small portion to Yahoo. But even if that would be compensated, my guess is that Google still get over 50% of the US search traffic.

This picture is by the way completely different for other markets. In Japan for example the word Google is almost unknown. The market leader there is Yahoo, by far. So, if you want to reach somebody in Japan, you would focus your search engine optimization efforts on Yahoo.

There are also markets where basically only Google exists as far as search engines is concerned. One example of this would be France, where Google enjoys a whopping 91% market share.

Google’s market share in France was 91.23% for February 2009. The major search engines that trailed Google were Yahoo (2.43%) and Live Search (2.29%). Source: Google Blog.

For the US market you are, at least for the time being, save if you optimize for Google. The good thing: If you have optimized your web site for Google, you are already very close to a home run on Bing and Yahoo. The differences are not that big anymore.

SEO for Bing differs not that much from Google SEO or Yahoo SEO. Reducing SERP bounces is the most important on page factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as this factor monitors how good your content is. Or better how good your content matches the “ad”. The search engine listing is nothing more than an ad. If that ad matches what you deliver, you will have happy visitors that turn into customers.

YouTube and SEO

Now the question arises, what you should do with the videos once created: Just upload to YouTube and leave it with that or should you upload to YouTube and also post them on your own site as well.

You should post them on your site as well.

1. This gives you more relevant content

2. This will increase the number of viewers, which will in turn give you a better ranking for the videos on YouTube. And this will then result in more viewers.

3. If you post the videos on your pages, you increase the time that visitors spend on your site. This is probably them most overlooked and most important SEO factor.

Search engines nowadays try to deliver excellent results to the visitor. How good the results are is measured by the bounce rate and by the time spend on a given page. The easiest way to increase the time spend is by putting videos on your site!

If you want to find out more about Youtube Marketing, I suggest you read an article from Glenn Gabe on youtube-ranking . He describes the Youtube Ranking factors as: title, description, tags, views, ratings, playlist additions, flagging, embeds, shares, comments, age of video, channel views, subscribers, inbound links (links from outside of YouTube pointing to your videos).

Bing

Bing encourages SEO (white hat SEO) and gives some clues in a document titled Bing–NewFeaturesForWebmasters.pdf .

Based on this document, the following things are important:

- Unique title for each page

- Unique meta descriptions for each page

Bing creates out of these sources the captions displayed on Bing. So, if you spend some time tweaking these, you will always do a better job than relying on the captions created by the search engine.

- Using consistent data structures between pages on your website

This means you should be placing similar data between pages using a similar tree structure, similar class names, support standard markup technologies, such as microformats, etc. That way the bing crawler can access and index your site much better, resulting in more pages being indexed.

- Building and submitting a Sitemap to bing

The sitemap should only be submitted initially and once there are major changes on you site.

After the sitemap is built, you can submit the sitemap.xml file via the Sitemap tool in Bing Webmaster Center or directly from your browser’s address bar by typing the following:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Make sure that you give the full URL for your website’s sitemap.xml file to bing by including it at the end of this line.

- Reducing SERP bounces

This is achieved by giving the visitor unique, high quality content and not putting everything on one page. Let them click forward to the next page and the next etc. The search engines register this (at least the first click through and the time). Adding a video to every page is also a good idea, as watching a video always takes sometime and that will be recorded favorably by Bing (and  Google SEO as well as Yahoo SEO). This is probably the most important on page SEO factor.

If the visitors stay on your site, you will be rewarded with more visitors. If they just bounce, you will not get more visitors from that search engine for that keyword or even for that category.

Aside from that, good old SEO like for example link building works, or as Bing states it: “Investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in Google and Yahoo! as well.“