In my little SEO world where I think everyone knows the simple stuff I forget that many people have websites that don’t have proper title tags. Since my partner John is an expert at doing SEO Site Audits, you think I’d know that even many corporate sites don’t use proper title tags. It really is an important, and easy to implement, part of proper site SEO. + Read More
I may be a bit paranoid but it comes with the internet marketing territory. I know everyone wants my demographic information and even more so, my wife’s and kids. The later simply because they have disposable income.Everyone needs to take the time to make sure their every move on the internet is not tracked, logged, used, and sold. + Read More
More and more I move away from talking pure SEO which is really all about rankings. I find myself talking more internet marketing strategy. Working for many small, medium, and large clients and for my own e-commerce company has taught me it’s all about return on investment (ROI). I believe that investment starts with filling the sales funnel. Fill the funnel, of a good company, with good qualified leads and you create good ROI. A good company is one that closes on those leads. If search engine traffic is the best source of those leads, go for those. If a guy standing on the street in a monkey suit is the best source, those are where you should spend your time.
It used to be that a good ranking on the right terms was the absolute best way to get good leads. It is still a strong source of those leads but it isn’t the only game in town. Internet marketing looks at many more facets of generating traffic. It looks at online advertising, local search, social media, and yes even email.
I spend a lot of time listening, analyzing, determining, and executing the best internet strategy for each company I consult. At the end of the day, I will even tell my clients if they’d be better off using the guy in the monkey suit.
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.
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. + Read More
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.
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
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:
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.
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. My partner at Marketing on the Web (www.marketing-ontheweb.com) does most of our audits but I do know a thing or two about a good SEO audit. The site I looked at 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”
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.
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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!
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