Google is rolling out Knowledge Graph. It will start modifying how it displays search results for contextually-ambiguous terms that could refer to more than one disparate knowledge domain.

For example, a search for “saints” could refer to a certain baseball team or to hallowed members of the Catholic Church. Trouble is, Google has no way of knowing which type of saint you meant. To help solve this, Knowledge Graph will help group the search results for your search so that you, the searcher, can indicate which meaning was intended.

If you are a website owner who is mindful of how Google search algorithms affect their site’s search rankings for important target keywords, you are right to wonder about how Knowledge Graph will affect you.

The details remain to be seen, but it is likely that this change alone will not greatly affect the order in which relevant results are displayed. In other words, your site’s rankings should remain mostly unchanged due to the introduction of Knowledge Graph. Rather, this new feature just gives the searcher more choices – especially for those contextually-ambiguous terms.

Find out more here.

It is unlikely that an unsupervised campaign will turn out as poorly as one did for YouTube and Toyota. Click below to see an LA Times article about a YouTube video depicting a Camry crashing into a supermarket – with the the video itself showing a Toyota banner ad across the bottom of the screen. Ouch!

Toyota Crash Ad Story

Still, leaving your campaign “running and unsupervised” can result in the following unfavorable outcomes:

a. paying way too much per click – which can cost hundreds in wasted clicks
b. bidding on keywords that are not relevant to your business
c. bidding on keywords that are garnering a lot of clicks but very few conversions (i.e., that don’t drive quality traffic to your site)
d. bidding on ads that are not getting clicked on
e. accidentally setting your campaign up to run ads in another state when your business only serves your city and the surrounding areas; again, more wasted clicks
f. spending thousands of dollars you didn’t mean to spend because you added an unwanted 0 to your daily budget figure; for example, if you accidentally set your daily budget at $100 a day instead of $10, you would end up overspending by $2,700 in a single month if left unchecked.

(etc.)

Enough said! So, check in on your Google Adwords or other text or banner ad campaigns regularly to make sure things are being properly taken care of – or hire somebody else to do the same.

For years, SEO-types (like us) have been telling you that we have secrets for how to do it. And the truth is, there are certainly “tricks of the trade” in SEO.

Still, as algorithms improve over time, what we are seeing is that tricks and techniques matter less and less. What increasingly matters is quality content.

Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other search sites are constantly tweaking their algorithms to make online searches render better, more relevant results. It’s nice to know that, moving forward, techniques and tricks will increasingly take a back seat to quality content. That’s the way it should be.

For more on what Google seems to believe constitutes quality content, check out the Bleu Blog.

Some animals are predators, some make their way as foragers. Some fly, some swim, some walk. There fish are habituated to living thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface under conditions of tremendous pressure. There are plants that can survive years without a drop of rainwater. Each plant, animal, fungus and microbe on the planet has found a special niche.

Your SEO efforts should emulate nature in this way. You need to find your keyword niche (or niches) for your website.

But you have an advantage that nature lacks: you can consciously determine your niche in minutes or hours, rather than over millions of years.

A keyword niche is a group of keywords that all contain a single target keyword. For example, if you are in the TV repair business, you will no doubt want to create a niche around the keyword “tv repair.” A good keyword tool can help you generate tens or even hundreds of long-tail keywords phrases that include this keyword phrase. For example, you may come up with as a partial list:

tv repair
hdtv repair
high def tv repair
tv repair service
inexpensive tv repair
local tv repair
tv repair in [my town]

Once you have identified and developed a keyword niche, it is time to “sprinkle” these keywords throughout at least one page of your site. And if this niche is a central theme to what your site is about, consider adding some or all of the keywords in this niche throughout other pages of your site, as well. Dedicate at least one page to each niche.

By finding and establishing keyword niches in which you can be competitive, you can garner hundreds or thousands of additional keyword search visits to your site each month.

You can hire search marketing companies like JCJ Interactive to do your SEO for you. Companies like ours can help you build orginal, quality content that search engines love, select the right target keywords, and create quality backlinks to your site from other quality sites.

However, achieving the very best-possible SEO results also requires that you structure your website strategically.

Let’s review how to do this by comparing example Case A and Case B below, then point out exactly why Case B is better than Case A.

Suppose you own a website that sells furniture. You want a particular page featuring a certain coffee table (model 1343) to rank well for the term “coffee table” on major search engines. Let’s look at two URLs examples, as well as the reasons why one is better than the other. Remember, by examining the URLs, you can get a direct view into how the site itself is structured.

Case A (good): www.[YourSite.com]/Model1343_CoffeeTable

Case B (better): www.[YourSite.com]/LivingRoomFurniture/CoffeeTables/Model1343_CoffeeTable

(note that the brackets [ ] used above simply indicate that this is a sample URL)

Here are the 3 reasons why “Case B” is better than “Case A”:

1. Case A simply tacks the page in question directly onto the Home Page. In other words, this particular pages “dangles” directly below the Home Page in terms of the site’s hierarchy. Meanwhile, Case B clearly employs a more complex hierarchical approach, classifying the particular model under the “Coffee Tables” section, which in turn is itself classified under the “Living Room Furniture” section of the site. This type of organizational scheme is valued more by search engine algorithms because it implies forethought during the design phase of the website. In other words, the search engine algorithm favors the fact that the website designer apparently put effort into making the site user-friendly and easy to navigate.

2. Case B has more relevant keywords in the URL itself, including featuring the word “Coffee Table” twice. (Search engines love it when relevant keywords are embedded in URLs).

3. Case B is simply more user-friendly. If you are a user visiting that site and searching for the coffee table in question, it is much easier to navigate when it is organized in this way. And, user-friendly websites cause people to stay on the sites longer – which is another feather in your cap when it comes to rankings.

For good SEO, in addition to building backlinks from other relevant, high-quality sites, be sure to pay close attention to the structure of your website.

Like anything else in life, there are two ways to get backlinks: the right way and the wrong way.

The WRONG way to to get inbound links pointed to your website is by pursuing “black hat” techniques. This essentially amounts to paying other random people (who host server farms, content aggregation websites, etc.) to post irrelevant links to your website in an indiscriminate way. That’s bad for business, and Google and other major search engines will dock you points for this.

The RIGHT way is to find or build unique content on other websites and then place links from those sites to your site.

Pretty simple, right? And, the theory all makes sense. After all, what Google and other search engine sites want is to serve up the best, most appropriate and relevant content in response to people entering various search terms. If their search results represent websites that come well-recommended by other websites (due, in part, to effect of backlinks from those sites), the search engine site has done its job properly.

Here are some handy tips from Wordtracker on how to build more quality backlinks:

62 Steps to Building Backlinks

(By the way, to get access to a free Wordtracker trial account, check out: Free Wordtracker Trial).

Of course, some pieces of real estate are valued at hundreds of dollars per square foot, while others are worth just pennies. Any good realtor will tell you that the main reason for the great variance in real estate values is: location, location, location.

When thinking about your website – and how to care for and feed it – it can be helpful to view it as you would a piece of real estate. Specifically, your website has two aspects that make it a lot like a piece of real estate:

a. the URL, or web address, is like a physical address, meaning: nobody else can have your exact address. It is one-of-a-kind. It can be bought and sold, but it cannot be duplicated.

b. the design and content of your site is akin to the layout and look-and-feel of a home, store, or piece of industrial real estate: the more time, resources, money, love and attention you put into it, the more you stand to get out of it.

Here are 5 tips for treating your website like a piece of valuable real estate:

1. Re-think the look-and-feel of your site now and then. Give your visitors something fresh to look at.

2. Consider purchasing variations on your URL. For example, if you own “RoundRockSEO.com,” consider buying “RoundRockSEOExpert.com” and “Round-Rock-SEO.com.” You never know what variations on your URL that people might be searching for.

3. Add a new addition now and again. For example, maybe your site needs a testimonials page or a news articles page. This performs the function of adding more content to your site, which helps get the attention of search engines.

4. Get links from other websites to your website. This is a great way to bring in traffic, and search engines love sites that have lots of backlinks, too.

5. Point out your site directly other folks now and again. For example, include it in e-mails, at the footer of faxes, e-newsletters, billboards, and other traditional ad spaces. Some of the best traffic sources are called “direct traffic,” whereby a person directly types in your URL to their browser.

Treat your website like the asset that it is, and you will find it increasing in value year after year.

“Denver plumber”

That would be a very lucrative position, indeed.

The advantage to geo-targeting your online content is that, if done successfully, your site will come up higher on search engines for the geo-specific keywords that matter most to you – and to your best prospects. Geo-specific words may be city names, regional names, counties, or other place-related names.

However, geo-targeting is not for everybody. Some business models just do not lend themselves to attracting only local traffic. So, should you geo-target? You consider geo-targeting if:

1. Most of your customers are within one hour (drive, train ride, walk, etc.) of your location.

2. Your business model requires or benefits from your meeting with customers in person and/or visiting their homes or offices directly.

3. You are not concerned that geo-targeting your website or other online content could make you appear to be too “local” or provincial, such that it could turn off customers who live or work elsewhere.

Remember, locally-originated traffic tends to “convert” much better for local businesses, so be sure to take advantage of geo-targeting if appropriate for your business.

One of the most fundamental questions to ask yourself is: how much website do you need? Of course, the answer will be affected in part by your needs, but just as equally by your budget.

Here are the factors that typically influence the cost of a website:

a. Uniqueness of design: will a template do the trick or do you require a custom-built site?
b. Page count: most basic sites are 5-7 pages long; however, e-commerce sites and other sites with heavy content can be signficiantly more
c. Blog: adding a blog costs extra, but having freshly-updated content on your site can be a huge benefit
d. Content Management System (CMS): allows you to easily update the site’s content and images once it is live
e. E-commerce: do you plan to sell products on your site?
f. Image gallery: static images usually do not cost more, but you may want a slideshow or image gallery
g. Flash: the use of Flash goes in and out of popularity; still, some sites do use it and it usually adds to the cost of developing your site

Consider which of these items you will want or need for your new website; then, plan accordingly.