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Experimenting With Social Media, Social Meals & Group Dining
Christian Vuong | August 8th, 2011
A decade ago, having your cell phone out at a restaurant would have been viewed as rude. Today, while still frowned upon, it’s becoming more commonplace for people to check-in when at a restaurant, tag their friends, or snap photos of food and immediately post them onto Facebook. In the recent years we’ve seen the rise of gourmet food trucks such as Kogi BBQ, lardon (bacon truck) , and The Shrimp Pimp Truck. We’ve also seen how social buying web sites such as Groupon have shaken up how far businesses and restaurants are willing to discount (for better or for worst), and how the big boys, Google and Facebook are jumping the game as well. This year feels a little different though. While food trucks and social deal web sites are still very hot, it seems like social meals and group dining have picked-up legs. Anyone that knows me, knows that I have a habit of checking into restaurants that I eat at. It’s not so much that I’m obsessed, which I might be, but more that I’m curious to see what other patrons are recommending and how restaurants are embracing social media. With many people now more comfortable than ever checking in and broadcasting to the world their locations via apps such as 4sq, Yelp, and Facebook, meeting up and eating with strangers from the Internet doesn’t seem as scary or creepy as it would have a decade ago. In comes the concept of social meals and group dining. Social dining comes Continue reading…
Tags: facebook deals, food trucks, google offers, group dining, groupon, grubwithus, social deals, social dining
Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment
Optimizing For Mobile & Local Search: 5 Things Businesses Need To Know About Local SEO
Christian Vuong | June 28th, 2011
The annual SMX Advanced Conference covers a vast array of information in the search industry. This year, like others, covered everything from SEO, to Social Media, to Paid Search and more. And while it did feel like every conversation touched on Google’s Panda update and its effects on the industry, there was an important underlying theme, which was that local search has grown and is becoming even more important to businesses. According to Google, local searches now account for 20% of searches on Google. Mix this in with comScore’s May 2011 report and now we’re looking at 2.24 billion queries a month on Google with local intent. Yes, that’s billion with a B. These changes aren’t just coming from search engines, but also from the mobile side. In mobile, 95% of smartphone users have looked up local information and 88% of these users generally take action within a day. Combine this with the 66% of users who use location based apps such as Groupon NOW, Yelp, shopkick & Happy Hours, and this makes optimizing and managing a business’ online reputation even more important. Besides VCs pouring in all this money for location based apps, Google is also investing, heavily marketing local search to businesses and to date has over 4 million business listings in its index. At the same time, Google has been constantly testing out new layouts for the Google Places results. Don’t assume Bing has taken this lying down though. Bing powered search continues to grow in market Continue reading…
Tags: Bing, bing business portal, foursquare, friend recommendations, groupon now, mobile search, seattle, shopkick, smx advanced, yelp
Posted in Local Search, SEO | 4 Comments
Optimizing Your Images for Organic Search: Part 2
Christian Vuong | August 26th, 2010
Just last month, I wrote a blog post about how to optimize images for Google’s revamped image search. Now 30 days later, the update. How does our image result stack up to a Winery that has been online since 2002? Search Query monte de oro monte de oro winery Google 1 1 Yahoo! 8 2 Bing 10 2 As you can see from the screenshots above, the optimized image now appears above the fold on all 3 major search engines. From just correctly naming and tagging the images, we’ve captured a spot for a name brand. Key Takeaways: Don’t be afraid if competitors have age on you! In this specific case while the term may not have been ultra-competitive, we still went against very established web sites in the wine, travel, and city-specific niches including the winery itself and TripAdvisor.com. Start in baby steps. SEO is a long-term strategy. Don’t wait to group hundreds of images together or for the next major upgrade to your CMS. Start by optimizing 1 image a week, move to 2 a week, and then 1 daily. At minimum upload all new images with the correct file naming (refer to previous post for recommendations). Consider the content around your image. If our entire blog post was about an experience at the winery, a review, or their varietals, it would add even more value and relevancy to this search term. And lastly, monitor analytics. Benchmark your progress and see what organic traffic that image or blog Continue reading…
Tags: bing images, google image search results, image optimization, seo for google images, yahoo images
Posted in SEO | No Comments
How To Get More Traffic By Optimizing Your Images for Organic Search
Christian Vuong | July 27th, 2010
Let me start this post with a disclaimer: Organic image search can work well for many web sites, but isn’t necessarily perfect for every business. It might be great for online retailers, hotels, and travel agencies, but not so much for the local plumber. Why Pay Attention Now? On July 20th, Google announced their revamped and oh-so-nicer version of Google Images. The new layout now includes a more slick grid format, thumbnail previews when you hover over an image and up to 1,000 images per page. Let me repeat that last one, up to 1,000 images on each page. As you scroll down on an image search results page, the page continues to populate itself with new image content. For the average user, after two minutes of browsing, they may feel like they are still on page 1 when in fact they are much deeper in Google’s image index (which now comes in at over 10 billion images). If anything this is a big win for the little guys as newer web sites that did not rank on the first or second page of image search now have many more chances to wow and impress potential visitors even when ranking 30-100 images down. Think of a mall that just expanded from 20 shops to 40, an art gallery that now features 10 artists instead of 5. Location and placement isn’t so much of an issue now, but quality of content really comes into play. This is Google’s image results pages Continue reading…
Case Study – Yoga Direct
Christian Vuong | April 5th, 2010
The largest direct importer and manufacturer of quality Yoga equipment in the US, YogaDirect’s brand was well established online, but the majority of its organic search traffic was a result of branded keyword searches. In short, YogaDirect.com was failing to attract 1st time visitors and losing out on valuable market share. Challenges Attracting 1st-time visitors meant YogaDirect needed to rank for non-branded and product-related keywords, but the highly saturated nature of the yoga niche coupled with YogaDirect’s young age in relation to its competitors meant they would have to work twice as hard. Strategy After performing a comprehensive audit of the client’s site, we devised a comprehensive SEO strategy focused on optimizing the site for popular yoga-related keywords and branding YogaDirect as a niche authority. We optimized the site for non-branded keywords with content To improve YogaDirect’s organic ranking for yoga, Pilates, and fitness-related keywords, we prescribed the addition of a healthy dose of unique content to the site. We also added content targeting category and product-specific keywords to respective pages, and optimized all content with H1 and H2 tags. We added unique Meta title tags and descriptions to each page To draw in more users, we optimized YogaDirect’s Meta title tags to target long tail and product-specific keywords and help identify unique pages. We also developed more compelling page descriptions and added calls-to-action to generate more clicks. We improved the URL naming strategy with more descriptive URLs To give YogaDirect even more ranking juice, we organized their URL structure Continue reading…
8 Reasons To (Re)start The Company Blog
Christian Vuong | February 11th, 2010
So you’ve given it a go in the past with the company blog, got the CEO’s buy-in, people actively blogging and even a little community going. But somewhere along that road the blogging initiative got pushed back and now is off the radar. For some companies, ranking well organically is not a problem and they can rank well without any active blogging or content additions. But for most web sites, this is not the case. Here’s 8 reasons why you should really consider starting up a company blog or restarting it in 2010. 1) Google loves content. Let me say that again, Google all of the search engines love content. By creating new and valuable content for the search engines, you generally increase the chances of your web site ranking better and for a larger variety of keywords. If you are in a news or breaking news type of industry, you should also look more into Query Deserves Freshness, a component of Google’s algorithm where new or updated pages receive a little extra boost in their rankings. And on a side note, did you know Google also index blogs quicker than a normal site? 2) Create and control the official company voice. A blog makes it that much easier to get in front of customers. Start small with the blog post a week and stick to that schedule. Once that is consistent, start expanding out and looking for weekly features and themes that your readers can look forward to (i.e. Continue reading…
