By Les Kollegian
Jacob Tyler Creative Group

Jacob Tyler and our sister company SEO Town handle Search Engine Optimization for a broad base of clients. The thing about SEO is that it’s not only a process that is 100% iterative, it’s also always a 100% learning experience. Keeping up with the brilliant minds at Google is not always an easy task even though they offer to help through support documents, forums, and more. For those of you out there who are saying “what about Bing and Yahoo?”… they have their place but they don’t hold a search “candle” to that of Google. This isn’t just because of their market share, but mostly because of the quality of their search algorithms. Thus, as a creative marketing agency, we put most of our emphasis on creating leads for our clients from Google and now even YouTube, the world’s second most searched search engine.

So now we get to a question we have been asking recently. Why are search results sometimes different on different systems and how can we accurately track where we rank organically in the eyes of our customers? Great question! Not so easy answer.

The good and bad:
Google does an amazing job of making searches for users relevant to their preferences by automatically personalizing the results. While this can be GREAT for the typical Web browser, it makes finding “true” search results a little more difficult. Here’s why.

In the past, the only way to receive better or “preferred/personal” results was to sign up for personalized search. Now, you can get customized results whenever you use Google. Depending upon whether or not you’re signed in to a Google Account when you search, the information they use for customizing your experience will be different:

Signed-in personalization: When you’re signed in, Google personalizes your search experience based on your Web History. If you don’t want to receive personalized results while you’re signed in, you can turn off Web History and remove it from your Google Account. You can also view and remove individual items from your Web History. At Jacob Tyler, we recommend our clients disable personalization on their own systems to get the most accurate search results. Otherwise, Google may place YOUR link toward the top of your results pages based on your previous search and clicks. See the image below on how to delete your Web history/personalization.

Signed-out customization: When you’re not signed in, Google customizes your search experience based on past search information linked to your browser, using a cookie. Google stores up to 180 days of signed-out search activity linked to your browser’s cookie, including queries and results you click.

Because many people might search from a single computer, the browser cookie may be associated with more than one person’s search activity. For this reason, Google doesn’t provide a method for viewing this signed-out search activity. If you don’t want to receive customized results while you are signed out, you can turn off these search customizations. See the image below to turn off cookies for signed out searches.

Of course, deleting cookies effects a LOT on your system including personal site preferences related to browsing, passwords, purchases, and more so you may or may not want to do this depending on “easy” you want your browsing experiences to be. For more information on how to control cookies, please visit http://www.aboutcookies.org

Here’s an illustration of the information Google uses in each case:

At this point, most of the internet browsing population is using Internet Explorer or Firefox for their day-to-day surfing and information. While it may make sense to turn off cookies and web history for those interested in the most “neutral” and true results, it’s also a pain and erases information that each user wants stored for future use. I recommend downloading another browser to use for your specific searches to determine organic ranking. For example, download Google Chrome and set up the browser to run in “incognito mode“. Once this is set up, customization and personalization features are turned off and you can just stick to this browser for your rank checking curiosity.

If you’d rather stick to your current Firefox and IE browsers, there is also a plug-in you can download from Yoast that makes it simple to disable personalization.

For any business, it is extremely important to stay on top of your current search engine rankings. To do so, you must avoid personalized search as you may end up seeing different rankings on different computers. While this is a great search feature, it will not provide useful insight for your SEO marketing campaigns.

by Jonathan Marshall

Today the JTCG Blog features Manoj Jasra, current director of Internet Marketing Strategies at Shaw Communications Inc. Jasra discusses the importance of incorporating Google analytics into not only your search engine marketing campaign, but your entire website development strategy from the start. It’s VERY important to understand the correct way to use the statistics from your analytics reports to make decisions about your website. In today’s heavy digital lifestyle, these decisions will have a direct impact on your business. Check out what this seasoned SEO Professional has to say in the video below.

By Les Kollegian, Creative Director

I would say on average, we meet with two-three potential new clients a week. The range of businesses can be from start-ups to fortune 500 companies. Frankly, there are benefits to both types of businesses. For start-ups, it is the ability to create a brand and message from the ground up. We love that work! To an artist, it’s truly a blank canvas that we can attack with any medium. As well, it’s the ability to create a partnership. I always tell our new clients that we have a vested interest in building their business. If they make money, they will keep us working and in return, give money back to us. Let’s be honest… I LOVE what I do but I am not in this for my health. I want to build my business just like everyone else so one day I can relax and not work ALL THE TIME.

When we meet with larger companies or established businesses that are looking for a new look, web design or brand strategy, it’s a different job. We have to work with what current brand equity they have and in most cases, make suggestions for changes that will enhance the brand and create new perceptions without a radical change in overall design.

Okay…so let me get to my point. I know you’re waiting. Everyone who walks through our front door comes in for a reason. They were either referred to us by another business that had a project completed successfully by Jacob Tyler OR they found us on Google due to our stellar search engine optimization and like our portfolio. The bottom line is they believe we do great work and we can help them. However, it never ceases to amaze me how many of the executives and entrepreneurs I meet want an award winning campaign as quickly as possible (i.e., tomorrow) on an exceptionally tight budget. It doesn’t work like that. Both start-up businesses and large companies are culprits of this practice. Thus I always tell them… Fast, Good, Cheap: Pick Two. I am not trying to be arrogant when I say this and I ask them to turn it around as if I was their client. For example, if my client was a doctor and I needed surgery to save my life ASAP, would I ask him for a discount? Okay…that may be a little extraordinary of an example, but let’s make it easier to understand. If I ask someone for a service like installing new countertops and appliances in my kitchen that I need in time for an event that requires extra work and overtime, why would I get a discount? It’s my house so of course it has to be an excellent job and I am requesting that it be done fast, so it would be pushing the envelope to ask for it cheap… right?

I’ll sum this up as I think I am starting to babble and vent a little too much here. Here goes:

If your job needs to be done quickly and in a fashion that will impress whoever will be viewing the result, it will not be inexpensive (or cheap). We love to work quickly and create award winning projects, that’s for sure but we can’t give discounts in this situation.

If your job needs to be done inexpensively and very fast, there is a good chance it will not be as good as you may want as we won’t be able to put the research and resources into it to make it as successful as possible. Frankly, we only do this for “quick and dirty” projects to show proof of concept.

If your job needs to be an award winner on a tight budget, it’s not going to get done fast. Oh, we’ll get it done and it will be great, but we’ll have to do it on OUR time since our resources may be going to other projects with different priorities.

No project is too big or too small for our firm. We take on every task as if it was our most important project. When you work with us, think of how you would charge YOUR clients or customers and how you would want to be treated during any transaction.

In the simplest way possible, SEM and SEO are tools which website creators, especially those who are promoting and selling a certain service or product, use in order to gain a lot of exposure and better ranking for their website. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, the simplicity ends there.

To make it a tad bit complex, SEM and SEO are not the same. As suggested by the names, SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, deals more with how a website is marketed to gain exposure in the different search engines available on the internet, while SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, deals with how the web creators develop and re-develop the content, quality and structure of their entire websites so that whenever an internet user types in a particular word in the search tab, their websites have a better chance of appearing on the first few search engine results pages (SERPS).

Now, to make it even more complex, although the functions of SEM and SEO seem different, they are more effective when used together. Since the main function of SEM is to gain more exposure for a website, the more common means for attraction are online advertisements, blogs, internet articles, partner and sponsored websites, and anything that can catch the eye of the internet user. SEM also makes use of PPC (pay-per-click) and paid inclusion to further push a website’s visibility. Lastly, it is also an important process in SEM to submit the name and URL of a website to different search engines and web directories if only to inform them of the website’s existence. All this is carried out to ensure the popularity of a website.

So how does SEO come together with SEM? Well, despite having all the advertisements provided by SEM, it is truly the SEO that allows the internet user to easily and conveniently find what he is looking for. Since the function of SEO is to gain a better ranking in the SERPS, the web creator has to constantly optimize his website in order to cater to the needs of the internet user and to make it easier for spiders or web crawlers to judge whether the website’s content is relevant to the word/s being searched. Optimization is not a simple and easy task. It involves having to restructure the website regularly (by editing the html code and meta tags, changing content, reorganizing the site map, developing an easier navigational structure, etc.) so as to adapt to the rapidly changing demands of the internet user. Still, when done properly, not only does SEO help a website become more useful and therefore, more often visited by the internet user, it also helps gain more exposure since it increases the website’s chances of gaining a better rank in the SERPS.

Both SEM and SEO success rely heavily on the words or context which Internet users type in whenever they search for something on the internet. Take PPC under SEM, for example. PPC is an ad that is triggered by a particular word or context used by an internet user. Once a particular word or context is searched, a corresponding PPC ad for a website comes out. SEO works in the same way. The web creator inputs a particular Meta tag (or keyword) in his html that he believes many internet users will use when searching for information, information which the web creator’s website may contain.

Although all of these processes involving SEM and SEO are tedious and time-consuming, it all boils down to knowing and serving the target audience. A web creator must be discerning enough to know what the internet users need and want, and at the same time he must have the real passion to inform and provide the internet users with the right service and product.

Search Engine Optimization San Diego