phil busk

CD Duplication

Philip — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:04:23 +0000

Wondering why in the world I would have an internet marketing post title CD Duplication? Well I making a few changes and doing some testing. Recently Google came out and said site wide links can hurt a site. I think this makes perfect sense when you have 25,000 links from one directory and, more than likely, they were paid links. What about when all those links happen naturally? Like, in my case, when the owner of a blog also owns another site. I seems pretty natural that one could do cross promotions of two sites. Google make the rules so I feel I need to abide as much as possible. I’ll remove a site wide link I have here and test something else.

I happen to currently own Buskerdoo LLC. It was my first baby step into e-commerce and internet marketing. Back in 2004, when I started the company, I had no idea that it would propel me into the internet marketing business, e-commerce businesses, and becoming a search engine optimization expert. Buskerdoo has evolved over the years to a full-fledged, self-sustained, e-commerce business that sells CD supplies, short run CD duplication, etc. Much of the company’s success comes from good SEO efforts.

For those that don’t know, small run CD duplication is usually used by small bands, performers, people getting married, churches, and photographers. CD duplication replaces CD replication which is for much higher quantity runs. With the advent of recordable CD’s and printable CD’s, small run CD duplication became a high quality product that is financially reasonable.

What’s great about performing your own SEO is that you can concentrate on beating out the big guys. It’s also a lot more affordable. For years, using very natural and Google approved methodology; Buskerdoo was able to outrank the likes of Amazon and other big players selling CD packaging. Recently we decided to go ahead and add CD duplication services. I came from a background in CD replication and actually put off adding these services because of a been-there-done-that attitude. The bolster the company, last year we added CD duplication.

Buskerdoo ranks remarkably high for cd sleeves and mailers products and cd sleeve printing but is far behind the ranking curve for duplication services. Not too unusual for a product that has only been online for less about a year. But, it’s a new world for SEO and requires a lot of diligence and knowledge of Google’s ideals as to what should or should not be done. With all that background and random thoughts said, I’m removing a site link to Buskerdoo.

More Transparency for Adwords Quality Score

Philip — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:42:05 +0000

Maybe some of the frustration level will be relieved if we all know what to fix to improve the quality score. Higher quality scores equal better ad placement for the dollar. See more here: Google-Sheds-Light-on-AdWords-Quality-Score-with-Comparative-Indicators

Check Those Title Tags

Philip — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:54:15 +0000

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.

If you have a site make sure you are using proper title tags. Here is s nice summary of what to do with title tags.

Only use one per page, placed within the tag
Place top-performing keywords in descending order
Put site branding at the end of the tag Exp: Title Tags | Phil Busk
Avoid stop words Exp: and, or, etc
Use the most important keywords used in the page’s body text
Keep it unique between pages
Avoid duplicating the exact text string within the
tag text
Avoid keyword stuffing

Blocking Prying Eyes

Philip — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:37:50 +0000

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.

Companies will pay big bucks to learn more about you, and service providers on the web are eager to get their hands on as much information about you as possible. So what do you do? How do you keep your information out of everyone else’s hands? Here’s a guide to surfing the web while keeping your privacy intact.

Do You Need Rankings or a Guy in a Monkey Suit?

Philip — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:58:17 +0000

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.

Credit Card Freeze – Check the History

Philip — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:14:14 +0000

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

Philip — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:03:27 +0000

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.The best site or the best attorney is not the one that ends up on the top of the search listing page; it’s the one with the site that is best structured and the one that has the best links. If someone is searching Farmville Attorney, it’s important that your site has links pointing to it from relevant sites that talk about attorneys, law, etc. The reality is that not very many people are going to link to an attorney site so we have to encourage other sites to naturally linked to your site from their sites. That is where a link builder comes in. We ask other sites to link to yours. By creating good articles, blog posts, etc. that can be leveraged to other sites that need content; we can exchange content for a link. Because they are so vital to high rankings, links have become a form of currency on the internet. There are many other tasks a link builder performs including writing and distributing press releases, researching viable sites to ask for links, creating “link bait” which can cause viral linking, placing blog posts with correct and appropriate links, searching for useable and legitimate local and regional directories that will link back. The list is longer than this, but you should ge the picture. If you don’t, email me, or give me a call, to discuss.

No More Site Links from Yahoo

Philip — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:19:30 +0000

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

Philip — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:36:33 +0000

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

Philip — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:35:08 +0000

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?

See more here.

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.