WATCH THIS: Introducing the Free SEO Analyzer and More

New Natural Search Optimization Products Debut

How do we start a new year at Yield Software? While marketers and advertisers were wrapping up 2009 focused on a critical holiday shopping season, things were very different at Yield Software. We were working diligently to finish development on two exciting new product offerings that we are proud to launch today.

The first is the Yield SEO Analyzer. This is a FREE product that enables you to quickly and easily tune your pages for attracting more natural search traffic. Every website owner wants to acquire more traffic and what could be better than more, free traffic! The Yield SEO Analyzer tests your page against a library of best practices and tells you in a very easy-to-understand way what you can do to rank higher in the organic section of the…

Synonyms, Search and SEO

Or the “Picture” vs. “Photo” Duel

In the Official Google Blog today, Steve Baker gives some (frankly unusual) insight into how it is Google’s algorithms deal with semantics, specifically synonyms.  As he points out in his post, it’s kind of funny and amazing what computers are good at, and what they’re not:

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can’t write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

But because Google’s primary directive is to produce search results most relevant to the query you typed into the search box,…

SEO Strategy: Link Building Tips, Part II

Sure-fire Ways to Bring Links in for a Landing

In Part One of this post, I gave you five tips for building inbound links to your site. In this post, you’ll find four more proven ways to develop high-quality links that can improve page rank in natural search results for your site.

Tip # 5: Get quoted – Seeing your company name (and a link back to your site) in a publication such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is fabulous, of course – as is the resulting link juice from such authoritative sites.

Getting quoted in these publications is not so easy. (One thing you can do to help the media contact you is to ensure your press room is up-to-date and that it includes a contact name and number for journalists who are on a deadline.…

SEO Strategy: Tips for Link Building

Part One: Do the Basic Stuff First

Debra Mastaler, author of the Link Spiel blog, recently wrote that after she gives presentations about link building, someone inevitably approaches her to say something along the lines of: “Come on, what are the ‘insider secrets’ to building links? Everyone already knows those you talked about.”

Never mind the fact that, as she says, she just spent 45 minutes “sharing how [her team] use the media, customer surveys, website elements, RSS, directories, content development and offline sources to build quality links.”

I had the opportunity to attend Debra’s link-building presentation at Search Engine Strategies–San Jose a couple of weeks ago, and she’s right: she gives you the basic methods for building links – as well as some really creative methods even I hadn’t considered.

As Debra states, “The easy part of link…

Understanding the Link Economy

…and Why it Matters to You

It can be tough to be a small business these days. Once upon a time, one need only find a tidy shop on a busy street, hang out a shingle, and set about serving the people in your neighborhood.

Then came the internet. And Google. And terms like search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.  And that shingle? Forget simply hanging the little guy over your door: you now have to do things like “link out”; attract “inbound links”– especially the really juicy kind; and get crawled by search engines. (All of which sounds like a plot to a really odd horror movie.)

In other words, businesses today must be online and are governed, in part, by the concept known as the Link Economy – a term popularized by Jeff Jarvis,…

SEO Strategies Series: Developing Powerful Title Tags that Convert

Eight Dos and Don’ts for Driving Clicks and Traffic

In my last blog post, I discussed how to develop the right list of keywords – that is, keywords that people are actually using in their searches. Once you have your keywords in hand, you’re ready to incorporate them into your Title and meta tags. A significant part of your website is each page’s HTML source code, which includes these tags and which give the search engines information about your site.

From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, the Title tag is most critical because it’s where you add your important keywords that describe what your Web page is about. (Some people call this tag the Page Title Tag for this reason.)

You see a Web page’s Title tag every time you open your browser as the Title tag is…

Hello, Bing

There’s a new search engine on the block and it’s called Bing.

Microsoft officially launched its new search product today at the D: All things Digital Conference, and CEO Steve Ballmer said it will replace the current Live Search offering beginning June 3rd.  The perennial search also-ran hopes their new product will be a game changer, and a (gorgeous) new promotional website describing the offering certainly offers a lot evidence to support such an ambition.

Bing will incorporate Microsoft’s adCenter, of course, and anticipates offering better targeting to advertisers. If you run PPC ad campaigns via adCenter for Live Search on our Yield Web Marketing Suite, there will be no interruption in service and your ads will display on results pages in Bing once the new service is fully live.

So what’s new and different about Bing? Here’s what we know…

Small Business Marketing Series: Effective, Effortless Websites

Improve Your Page Rank on Search Engines

Maintaining and updating a small business website can often become a huge headache for business owners. Many small business owners start by outsourcing the creation of a website, which is then hosted on a service that may or may not be the host for the e-commerce site.

After the site is live and inevitable changes are required, making those changes typically involves re-engaging the contractor to do the updates. Because small business owners often defer updates to their sites in order to bundle as many changes as possible into a single work order, websites can quickly get out of date and begin to fall down in the rankings of natural (or organic) search engine results.  And keeping your website as high as possible in natural search results — called search…

It’s Official: We’re Open for Business

From ‘Private Beta’ to Available Now!

As of this moment, we’ve officially launched the new Yield Web Marketing Suite, a simplified way to drive new traffic and customer conversions at a low overall cost.  As part of our launch week activities, we’ll be demonstrating our browser-based system at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which opens tonight and continues through April 3, 2009 at the Moscone West Convention Center.  And we’ve got to admit it: we’re all pretty darn proud of what we’ve accomplished and are really looking forward to showing it off!

The Yield Web Marketing Suite, which up until now was in private beta, is built with small and mid-size businesses in mind.  Primarily, our team has responded to the long-standing desire to make search marketing more simple and intuitive. By combining and automating…

Web Marketing 101 Series: Intro to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which owners of websites make improvements to the content, HTML code and inbound links of their web pages to make it easier for search engines to index them, and to ensure their pages naturally appear in results for relevant searches.

When you view a search engine result page in Google, Yahoo! Search or Microsoft Live Search, you almost always see two kinds of results: Sponsored Links, which advertisers pay to place on the page, and natural search results.  On Google, for instance, sponsored links can be found on the top and right-hand sections of the page, while natural (or organic) search results can be found in the main section of the page.  At the bottom of the page, you’ll typically see that the page is one of many,…