Credit Card Freeze – Check the History
Posted by Philip | Filed under money, pet peeves
I appreciate that credit card company’s monitor and freeze accounts when they see suspicious activity. It has probably saved billions in fraud. Where I have a problem is when they freeze my business account about every 3 months based on obviously legit charges. I take 10-15 minutes to call them up, give my account info, explain the issue, get transferred to the correct department, give them my account info, explain the issue, etc. Then, 9 out of 10 times, I’m given a list of suspicious charges that are ok. My rub is that most of the time these are monthly recurring charges placed to the same companies. Pull up the history and use your heads people. Stop wasting our time.
Link Building 101
Posted by Philip | Filed under link building, seo
I was working with a client this week to explain links and link building. I thought this ended up being a simple but effective link building explanation for a law firm.
Link building builds votes and endorsements for your site. When we build links, we contact other websites to gain links back to your website. Sometimes this is accomplished by making comments to law related content on other websites, sometimes by offering content to other websites in exchange for links back, other times it is creating and posting content among properties we own to build conversations about your services.
An example in the non-internet world would be: When we are looking for a good attorney we look in the phone book, we look at billboard, commercials, and we ask people their opinion. From that research, the attorney that appears most relevant to our needs is the one that goes to the top of our list. These are the attorneys we are going to call.
In the internet world, better relevancy to the searchers search query means higher ranking on the search page.
One of the ways that search engines determine the relevancy of a web page is through link analysis. The search engine examines other sites that link to your site, the text of the link , the content of both your page and the site linking to your site, and they look at other sites linking to the one linking to yours; all to determine relevancy. So the site with many relevant links that meet the criteria the search engine determines is best for high ranking will show up higher in the search results. (more…)
No More Site Links from Yahoo
Posted by Philip | Filed under seo
It’s a sad day indeed. Yahoo closing down Site Explorer. No longer can one go to Yahoo and get a quick idea of how many links point to a site. This has been a great tool for years when I needed to do a very quick anlaysis of the competiveness of a site. I have otehr paid tools that will be fine but the Yahoo tool was very easy, fast, and free.
Tiss The Season for Search Algorithm Updates
Posted by Philip | Filed under search, seo
Google Search Algorithm Change for Freshness to Impact 35% Of Searches
Google announced they are rolling out a new search algorithm change that helps make the search results “fresher.” The big news here is that besides for the results being fresher, the results will change for about 35% of all searches. MORE
Panda Updates Got You Down
Posted by Philip | Filed under business, google, marketing, seo
Do they have your site sown in the rankings? Google has rolled out several search algorithm changes over the last year that are designed to improve search results. These changes, named Panda, are designed to help people find high-quality sites. The problem for many sites, and their owners, has been that they had no clue why their search rankings dropped like a rock. It all boils down to quality.
Google makes money by people coming back and using their search product. If they use it there is a good chance they will click on ads. Google make billions of dollars from their search ads. It stands to reason that they want to give their searchers the best results possible so they keep coming back. Google search results mean good quality results. How many times have you searched for some term and ended up sifting through several less than stellar sites? I do it day in and day out. What is quality?
You can read a hundred posts on what to do about Panda. I can boil it down to this: eliminate duplicate content and thin content. If you have pages that are exactly the same as twenty other sites on the web then you have a problem. I guarantee if you have a e-commerce site that sells the same thin as other sites, you have duplicate content. That is, unless you took the time to change the descriptions and make them unique to your site. Thin content is all the crummy pages out there that have about 100 words on them and they tell you nothing. They are normally laden with ads and tons of links pointing away from the page.
Make sure you are delivering a quality site. Google says that Panda is just one of five hundred search “improvements” they plan to roll out. I loved these word from Google. I’ve been telling people for a long time to think the way Google thinks.
if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we’ve been looking at the issue:
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
If you have search terms that have lost a lot of ground in Google and you have no idea why, talk to a professional search engine optimizer. They can help.
A Mini SEO Audit
Posted by Philip | Filed under adwords, analytics, google, marketing, seo
Using my Philip Busk Linkedin account, I did a mini SEO audit for someone that posted a site on Linkedin that I thought was worth sharing. The site is pretty much a business PowerPoint template site but the company offers several levels of PowerPoint support including templates, presentation makeovers, consultation, and complete presentation builds. This mini audit took about 30 minutes and would normally take about 20 hours so it will be very thin and generic.
Market Analysis
Their Initial Key-phrases – “Business Presentations”, “PowerPoint Presentations”
- Too generic, doesn’t bring in targeted traffic, too much competition
- Narrow your focus
- Pick more specific key-phrases – use a keyword tool to determine the number of searches done daily.
Refined Key-phrases – “PowerPoint business presentations” (~60 per day), “business presentation templates” (~45 per day), “business presentations PowerPoint templates.” A lot less searches but much more focused. You will need to dig into and generate many more of these. Do some research on long tail key-words. Generate more ideas. Get very specific with your categories: “health and safety PowerPoint presentations”, “medical tourism PowerPoint presentations”, etc. Use a key-word discovery tool and type in “PowerPoint templates”, “business templates”, “PowerPoint business presentations”, etc and start to create a list of potential phrases.
- Much lower traffic but much more targeted, less competition
Home Page
- Tags – What is the main emphasis
- Change tag to PowerPoint Presentation Templates | Pure Presentations
- Change description to “selling copy” that will entice a searcher into your site. Limit to 160 characters (more…)
Stupid SEO Advice Never Seems to Go Away
Posted by Philip | Filed under seo
Here is a great article on stupid SEO advice. It’s out there folks. My advic has always been to verify and test any advice you get, even from the experts. If you are working on clinets sites; test and verify on your own first. It may be easier for me to do this becasue of my engineering and sales management back ground. Engineers test theroies and in sales you learn to be slightly sceptical of information. Test and verify!
Google Tests Site Name in Search Results
Posted by Philip | Filed under google, uncategorized
Google is testing using the site name instead of the complete url of the search results page. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-site-name-snippet-13557.html
The good and bad in my opinion: It takes the keyword issues out of play in the url display and focuses more on the brand. At the same time, it removes a potential filter for the searcher to find what they are looking for. I’m sure there will be much more in depth discussion form other sources in the days to come.
Owned by my 8 year old in Wii “Just Dance.”
Posted by Philip | Filed under family
Just got owned by my 8 year old in Wii “Just Dance.” I had no idea it was that hard.
You’d think I had a fighting chance because we were going challenging on MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This.” My score was 2500. I decide that after the 6500+ score by my eight year old and the 3500+ score by my six year old it was time to quit. Not to mention I was out of breath and were hardly breathing. My eight year old told me I needed to loosen up to dance. It might be a great workout late at night after everyone else is in bed asleep.
Daddy, are you going to make money today?
Posted by Philip | Filed under business, family, marketing
When my six-year-old asked me if I was going to make money today at first I thought, “Man, I hope so.” But as I pondered the question and the answer I realized what I was going to do was make money for my clients today; when it comes right down to it that is my job. When companies hire me as an internet marketer and give me their trust, I take on a responsibility to help increase their business. I can’t force prospects to call, fill out a form, or buy something from a site, but I can increase viable and valuable traffic.
I know, not all search engine optimization people look at their clients the way but I do. I believe each of us should look at our jobs this way; we should be helping our clients make money. When I was working in sales and marketing for another company I felt this way. When I worked in technical support I felt this way. When I worked as an engineer I felt this way. I guess I feel this way partly because my parents were entrepreneurs and I was brought up in a family business.
I think that everyone in the workforce has an obligation to make their company or client money. We should all be giving our best and giving the best return on investment (ROI) possible. In most circumstances, if you give your best to your company or client, you will gain. People have a natural tendency to favor a great ROI. I’m going to get busy and make my clients money today so I can tell my little one that yes, I’m going to make money today.