Astral Web Blog

KML major test to push local listings forward

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:14:29 +0000

This article will include a test to kml updates and google local listings. One of the important factors to ranking are user content and this test article will check our assumption and use indexation of user content, in particular of kml content through external websites. I have updated 6 kml files, will upload them to this domain (promoteseo.com) and post an article. Later on I will update the time it took to “catch” and what effects happened from this update.

Update 1
when testing the posting, i noticed that plain text for the kml file was being displayed instead of opening up google earth, so added to my htaccess (on linux server) the following:

AddType application/vnd.google-earth.kmz kmz
AddType application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml kml

Update 2
second thing to make sure that it got indexed was go to maps.google.com, typed in the full URL of the KML file and click Search Maps. In the resulting page, click Save to my Maps and continued to promote.

Location #1
Elizabeth Mestnik Acting Studio
6581 Santa Monica blvd
Hollywood, CA 90038
(323) 528-6280
KML

Location #2
Astral Web Inc.
20058 Ventura Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 91364
(310) 980-7395
KML

Location #3
Jewelties
10800 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90064
(877) 882-2044
KML

Location #4
Luxury Big Island
PO BOX 6613
Kamuela, HI 96743
(808) 443-1320
KML

Location #5
MacGregor & Collins, LLP
1000 Quail Street, Suite 110
Newport Beach, CA 92660
(949) 250-6097
KML

Location #6
Total Watch Repair
10800 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90064
(310) 920-2851
KML

Let me know your thoughts as well

update 3
let’s try to link to the compilation of “saved maps”

Test #2

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:21:18 +0000

hopefully now we will get a better understand of the factors and continue fun tests and let others know.

here it goes

http://www.propeller.com/member/astwbefr/

http://www.diigo.com/user/astralweb

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=106473699048211368466&hl=en&gl=us

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&gl=us&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=116212669806890863213.00048f24d69ce4705d831

http://seolosangeles.newsvine.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/foodtruckz/

http://www.reddit.com/user/astralwebby/

http://www.delicious.com/tzvielli

continue to use the time wisely!!!

Testing out google kml formats

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:18:40 +0000

It has been a long wait and now finally Astral Web is testing google kml formats and the connection to google maps and local business listings.

View Favorite local online business in los angeles in a larger map

Good luck!

Advanced Web Ranking Review

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:06:09 +0000

Each and every web developer and in particular SEO Specialist needs to have killer tools to save time, help organize key processes and of course present clients with regular professional reports. Astral Web would love to present below an unbiased finding and review of Advanced Web Rankings Software by Caphyon according to important factors that Astral Web looks at in a web ranking software.

Advanced Web Ranking – Version Used: Enterprise 7.3 on Windows Vista

1. Setting Up a Project

AWR includes a tabbed design to setup your projects. Upon first installation of software, the setup is quite easy. Steps include:
a. choice of search engines – there is an extensive list of search engines although we only utilize the top 3 (google, yahoo and msn) and local search engines.

b. setup of website – includes a color matching to help projects with large number of clients (great!)
c. selection of keywords – also includes a suggest feature to help add additional keywords if you don’t have you definitive keywords prior to setup.
d. Save as project name

2. Usability and First time usage

Upon completion of save project process, a new window appears and web ranking begins. The keyword gathering seems to take quite awhile (11 minutes for 6 keywords for each search engine) to run but slowness is most likely due to imitating real searches and avoiding captcha and banned/unnatural results. you can tweak the requests numbers but if you do so, please be aware of Search engine blocking. For now we are not in any rush.

Once the initial web rankings process has complete, we started to take a look at the data. At first glance, the navigation was a bit difficult to find where and how to work with it, but after a few minutes, the overwhelming look and buttons were a thing of the past. (see advanced web ranking assistant button with question mark icon on top left hand corner for easier navigation beginning)

* top sites tab is a great feature to help with competitor analysis and running after competition links (later you can use the double linkdomain: commands with pairs of competition in yahoo to help out)

* sort out list of keywords by SE in keyword check in search engines box on left hand side

* filter box helps sort out long lists of keywords

* chart feature should be a bit more visually professional and customizable

Overall ease rating from 1-10 is a 7.5

3. Generating a Report

One of the most important features is pleasing our clients and representing our work in a professional manner is almost as important as providing results. Every company knows this.

Reporting offers quite some customization. While playing with the different file extensions, html seems to provide the cleanest interface to show the client, especially for clients that have long url’s the alignment of the table and cells fit best. Customization we have completed includes client logo and business information (address, url).

* note again that the graph functionality was not used as it does not prove well enough design to want to implement.

Scheduling reports – We have scheduled a weekly monday reporting system for ranking updates and report generation. Setting it up was easy and worked as expected. We are currently working on setting up a separate machine for rankings and testing purposes.

4. Local Search Engines

Throughout these last 2 years, we have received a large increase in local business optimization contacts and work.

We have setup a test campaign in Advanced Web Ranking and there seems to be an issue with the process. To begin with, we have setup our local search engine by city and selected the specific local search engine but once we have ran a report, the position, best and all other fields other than “rank” where not working and specified a non number (-).

This is a major drawback and needs to be fixed!

5. Additional

* we strongly recommend every user to go to the preference page under options, browse around and customize fields

* proxy server option is a great plus although we have not tested it yet

* Advanced Web Rankings also comes with a detailed user guide for some of

those thorough ones out there.

Summary:

Advanced Web Ranking Provides a Solid Web Ranking Software Package for small to medium web development SEO companies. Every Seo firm needs a solid software to help save time and send reports to clients and AWR is a solid piece of software. Although there are a few downsides to this software, we are glad to say that Advanced Web Ranking is a major thumbs up!

The only downsides that we hope for them to fix are:

a. adding side comments to reports (not mandatory)
b. graphs – Clients need to be shown the extra push in reports and AWR did not seem to bring that design to the table yet
c. a must fix in google local business search rankings process and reporting (see above #4)

We will continue to play around with the search engine ranking software and Keyword Research Tool and do recommend it to our partner seo firm.

Content is King

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:00:39 +0000

Search engine optimization industry is picking up the momentum day by day and now its an era of SEO which says “be online or remain out of line”.

Webmasters across the world are working hard to help the online entrepreneurs to raise up their businesses.

Mentioned herewith are the top ten onsite optimization tips :

1. Use Keyword in Title tag : Search engine give the topmost priority to the title tag, so its advised to use keyword in the title tag but the limit of character should not exceed 70.

2. Keyword in the URL : Keep your URLs short and clean, also try to use keywords in the URL but avoid repititions. For eg. www.domain.com/keyword.html is BEST rather than www.domain.com?123=cat is not preferred

3. Main proper keywords density over the webapges. Its is preferred to keep the keyword density from 1-3% for peak targeting.

4. Use keywords in the anchor text.

5. Use keywords in the H1 and H2 tags. (Keep only one H1 tag per page)

6. Use proper keywords in alt tag (But do not overstuff the same).

7. Use targeted keywords in meta tags (description tag not to exceed 150-170 characters)

8. Generate XML site map with the associated protocol for all the URLs. The goolge sitemap should follow the sitemap protocol and the maximum URLS it can have is 10K.

9. Generate URLLIST.txt consisting of all targeted URLs.

10. Put no index, no tags wherever required in order to avoid duplicity and preserve google pagerank juice.

Besides there are other onsite optimization tips including keyword stemming, keyword proximity, keyword prominence etc. but the factors mention from #1 to #10 are the most importants. These tips if implemented properly can yield very good results.

Visit one of the best Los Angeles search engine optimization company and enhance your rankings and improve sales.

Content is King

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:59:55 +0000

Content is King, it rules the web in the same manner as it rules the physical world in the form of press which considered as 4th estate.

Content plays a key role in both search engine optimization as well as conversions. Whether you are selling a product or a service, its your content which appeals to the customers to purchase.

For SEO it’s a lifeline as search engines indexes webpages and rank them on the basis of keywords present in the content. Site with unique content enjoy the topmost position thereby placing the content writing services on priority for any SEO executive. We can play with codes and optimize our site SEO friendly but if it lacks content it cannot appear on search engines. Hence it is advised to use content on your site more wisely and in an appropriate manner.

The major boom which has shaken the world of content is the Blog, which are just a great resource for information as they drive traffic which exceed with the leading portals. Blogs usually contains the content in the form of post which a user can read and circulate, the commenting part of the blog make it a web 2.0 property and its becoming more prominent over the cyberspace.

Hence there is no doubt in saying that content is king or the content rules the web. Whether its in the form of text, video or photo it’s the only thing which creates a user engagement model on the site. There are millions of sites running with few or less content but site with quality and more content have better visibility across search engines. Also it’s a common fact that as many pages you have as many keywords you can target AND more traffic you will receive.

Visit Search Engine Optimization Los Angeles for more info regarding SEO and Content writing services.

Importance of Great Title in Viral Articles

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:58:32 +0000

Today, our attention span has shortened tremendously from the pace we had 50 years ago. We are much better at multitasking and want more and more feeds and information quicker. The downside to this effect is that we scan everything and miss out, so for a viral marketer, we need to make every entry point count so we can get a chance to prove our point. (if only the radio producer were to hear our new song, then we would…)

An great viral title tag is golden.

We would like to present a few samples taken from digg.com

10 Most influential people on web – 2010
In Home Do-It-Yourself Small Hadron Collider (GIF)
Why you shouldn’t have your boss on Facebook (Pic)
8 Things That Suck About the iPad
A truly honest protestor [PIC]